September When It Comes
by La Guera
Summary: For seven months, Greg Sanders has kept a wonderful secret and counted himself a lucky man, but beneath the bright lights of Vegas are shadows and deeper truths, and when the disgruntled husband of a convicted murderess exacts his revenge, Greg has five d
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

_I watch the clouds go sailing;_

_I watch the clock and sun._

_Oh, I watch myself depending on_

_September when it comes.-"September When It Comes"-Roseanne Cash_

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer and CBS. No money is being made and no infringement is intended. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders belongs to me.

"September WhenIt Comes" is the property of Roseanne Cash and RCA, and is available on her record, _Rules For Travel_(2003).

**A/N: **After four years in HP fandom, I started this fic on a whim. I needed fresh characters and a new playground. Those of you following my magnum opus need not fear; I'm still plugging away. I just had a plot bunny and a burning desire to try my hand at CSI.

As in my other WIP, a character has a disability. If this offends you or sets off your badfic sensor, leave now. I can do no more than write what I know.

This was begun prior to Season 6, so Greg's sudden marriage was happy serendipity.

Fifteen minutes into his shift at the Las Vegas crime lab, Greg Sanders had no idea that the fabric of his life was about to unravel. He would not be aware of the fact for another three hours, and in that time, he would make small talk with Archie Johnson, the AV and computer tech, engage in idle banter with Nick Stokes and Warrick Brown, and use the restroom. He would also catch the glint of the plain, golden wedding band on the third finger of his left hand and allow himself a smile. When the message of calamity came down, writ large in the lines of Detective Jim Brass' face and the haggard, haunted eyes of Gil Grissom, it would be to the glimmer of gold and the fleeting flush of happiness that he would anchor himself.

For now, though, the earth was still solid and reassuring beneath his feet, and the twinkling band was hidden beneath two layers of latex gloves as he sorted through the evidence from his latest case, a suspicious circs case involving a fifty-seven-year-old widower, a vast fortune, and a buxom bride thirty years the deceased groom's junior. To hear Brass tell it, there was also an obnoxious only son and his shady Vegas lawyer soon to enter the picture, and he could only imagine the fireworks that would erupt _then._

He hummed as he worked, and his head bobbed to the rhythm of a song only he could hear. If he'd had his druthers, he'd have his radio blasting, but Grissom, an avowed lover of classical music and all things orderly, loathed the strident discord of punk and the sweet aria of three chords and an attitude problem. What had he called it again? His brow furrowed as he searched his memory for the conversation in question. Ah, yes. "A cacophony of the pathological mind."

"Philistine," Greg sniffed as he carefully unsealed an evidence bag containing the hotel bed linens upon which the dearly departed Mr. Proulx had spent his last evening.

"Hey, now, I ain't that bad," came the sardonic reply from the doorway, and he looked up to see Warrick Brown ambling into the room, one hand shoved into the pocket of his black jeans.

"Hey, Warrick." He jerked his head in casual acknowledgement. "No hot case for you?"

Warrick snorted. "Not yet, but I've only been here five minutes. Looks like you're busy, though." He came inside the room for a better look at the bagged objects scattered over the table.

"Indeed I do," Greg agreed. "What you see here are the silent witnesses to the sad demise of one Mr. Gerard Proulx, a fifty-seven-year-old industrial magnate found dead in his hotel suite at the Tangiers." He gestured grandiloquently at the various evidence bags.

"Homicide?"

"Not sure yet. However, I can tell you that he was found toes-up in bed, nude, with no obvious signs of foul play. Gave the poor maid who came in for the evening turn-down service quite the show, I'm told."

"No doubt. Sounds like you might have another member of the DFO club on your hands."

Greg blinked, nonplussed. "DFO club?"

"The Done Fell Over club. We get a couple new members every year. People who are fine one minute and wearing a toetag the next. Doc opens them up, and lo and behold, he can't find anything wrong with them except for the fact that that they're stone cold dead. Maybe Mr. Proulx just had the big one."

"That may be, but since he left behind a vast fortune, a hotly contested will, and a new bride who was still cutting her teeth when her husband made his first million, a little caution never hurt." He smoothed the bed linens on the sterilized table top and pulled the magnifying light to himself.

"Ah, one of _those,_" said Warrick sagely. "A guaranteed three-ring circus."

"Is this the voice of experience?" He peered into the magnifying glass.

"You better believe it." Warrick shook his head in wry recollection. "Back when I was a CSI Level One, one of my first cases involved an eccentric billionaire who had the bad form to pop off in the hot tub after a night of carousing and romance with his nubile young bride."

Greg paused in his examination of the bed linens, intrigued. "He didn't…you know…ride off into the eternal sunset-,"

"In the saddle?" Warrick finished for him. "The widow admitted that she and her geriatric Cassanova had played X-rated Lewis and Clark several times over the course of the evening, but we never found any evidence of little swimmers in the water or caught in the filter. All we found was a dead floater in the hot tub and an empty champagne carafe on the side of the tub. Doc opened him up and figured out he'd had a massive heart attack."

"Case closed?" Greg returned his attention to the magnifying glass.

"You'd think, and if I'd been in charge, it would've been, but I wasn't. Gris was, and he insisted on doing a full tox screen and analysis of the carafe contents. You know how obsessive he can get."

"Not obsessive, Warrick. Thorough. And it turned out my prudence was justified, was it not?" Gil Grissom strode into the room, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a sheaf of assignment slips in the other.

Warrick nodded. "Yeah. Turns out the old man had ingested a massive dose of digitalis just before his death, but when we checked his medical records, they showed he'd never had so much as had indigestion. There was no reason for him to have digitalis in his system, and when we checked his medicine cabinet, we didn't find any. We _did _find a bottle of Viagra, though."

"Go, Gramps," Greg muttered. His eyes narrowed as he spotted a speck of black particulate matter caught in the dense threads of the eight-hundred thread count sheets.

He reached for the tweezers, eyes still fixed on the speck. The twin layers of latex made his movements cumbersome, and as his fingers closed around the small, metal tool, his wedding band stood out in sharp relief.

_Mrs. Greg Sanders is at home, waiting for me, _he thought with private relish, and his lips twitched in a fleeting smile.

"Find something, Greg?" Grissom asked. His eyes were sharp and alert behind his glasses despite the bruised pouches of perpetual weariness beneath them.

"Maybe." He tweezed the particle between the tines and plucked it from the nest of Egyptian cotton. "Could be dirt, or it could liquid latex. I'll get it down to Hodges in Trace as soon as I finish up here." He opened a drawer beneath the table top and fumbled for the manila evidence envelopes he knew were kept there.

"Good." High praise coming from Grissom.

"So," he prompted as he dropped the substance into the envelope, "what happened to the floater in the hot tub? Digitalis in the wine carafe?" He sealed the envelope and set it aside.

Surprisingly, it was Grissom who picked up the thread of the tale. He took a sip of coffee from the Styrofoam cup before he spoke. "Yes. And in the Viagra. A more than lethal dose."

Greg whistled appreciatively. "The ole double whammy. Let me guess-Princess was the main beneficiary of Sugar Daddy's will, and she couldn't wait for him to die decently, so she decided to help things along."

"Digitalis, Mother Nature's helping hand," Warrick said drily.

"That's right, Greg," Grissom answered, and took another sip of coffee.

"There's one will that'll never be contested."

Grissom offered an enigmatic smile over the rim of his cup. "Especially not since the son went to jail, too." At Greg's obvious confusion, he continued. "The victim's son was a physician, and he and his stepmother were having an affair. Apparently, the victim discovered what was happening and had threatened to disinherit them both and divorce the wife. Rather than let that happen, the son filled his father's Viagra prescription with pills laced with digitalis and gave the wife some to slip into the champagne in case the tainted pills failed."

"Ouch."

"The lovebirds received life sentences."

"More like jailbirds," Warrick pointed out, and the corner of his mouth twitched in amusement.

"What happened to the money?" Greg slid another section of bed linen under the magnifying glass.

Grissom considered the question for a moment. "I'm not certain. Estate law was never my strong suit."

Greg quirked an eyebrow in surprise. "What's this? Could it be that the legendary Gil Grissom's vast pool of knowledge isn't bottomless after all?"

Another sip of coffee. Another secretive curving of thin lips. "Only a fool believes he has no limitations."

"Confucius?" Warrick ventured.

"Gil Grissom." He straightened his shoulders. "So, you see, Greg, one must not rush to judgment." He drained his cup and tossed it into the wastebasket just inside the laboratory door.

"I was a rookie," Warrick said, and though his tone was light, Greg did not miss the note of exasperated defensiveness in his reply.

Grissom was unfazed. "But you know better now, don't you?" he asked sedately.

Warrick nodded. "Thank God for that."

Grissom adjusted his glasses with a resettling of the earpiece against the curve of his ear. "Fascinating as this trip down memory lane has been, circumstances dictate a return to the present." He riffled through the assignment slips he held and slipped one from the sheaf. "There's been a probable robbery/homicide at 4234 Chesterton Avenue. Take Catherine."

Warrick took the proffered slip, scanned it, and tucked it into the pocket of his CSI-issue vest. "I'm on it." He tapped Greg on one thin shoulder. "Good luck with the DFO."

"See ya," Greg called, but Warrick was already out the door and disappearing down the hallway.

Grissom, too, headed for the door, shuffling the remaining assignment slips as he went, and then he paused at the threshold. "Greg?"

Greg did not look up from his work, but his shoulders tensed, and his fingers tightened involuntarily around the length of bedsheet. He thought he knew what was coming, and after seven months, it was a battle he was weary of fighting.

"I noticed you're wearing your wedding band under your gloves."

_What don't you notice?_ he thought irritably, but he kept his voice neutral as he replied, "Yes."

"We've discussed this before, Greg." Grissom spoke as though he were addressing a recalcitrant and not-very bright child.

_Yes, we have. Far too many times for my liking. It's none of your business. _"Yes, we have, but there is nothing in the Clark County lab protocol that says I can't wear it. I've checked. Since the ring is a smooth band and possesses nothing that would cause perforation of the latex, the risk of cross contamination is miniscule, if not altogether impossible. Therefore, I am well within my rights to wear it."

"Miniscule is not-,"

Greg looked up from the bed sheet and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, dimly registering as he did so that he would have to sanitize and re-glove. The argument was giving him a headache.

"I understand your concern, Grissom, seeing as how you've expressed it roughly a thousand times since I got married. Really, I do. But until Ecklie issues a memo, the ring stays put."

At the mention of the assistant director's name, Grissom's lips puckered in an unconscious moue of disdain, and Greg was torn between the urge to snicker and the compulsion to apologize. The long-simmering feud between the two men was the stuff of legend among the CSIs and assorted lab techs, and for a while, there had even been a clandestine betting pool as to which of them would put the other on Doc Robbins' slab. Before it had dissolved last winter, Greg had placed a tenner on Grissom in the parking lot with a tire iron. No doubt the prospect of broaching the subject with his nemesis had soured the spittle in Grissom's mouth.

"We'll talk later." Pained, as though he had been stricken with a sudden malaise. Then he was gone, and the clip of his soles on the staid, grey linoleum faded as he retreated to the cocoon of his office, with its books and bugs pinned on cork boards and encased in tombs of glass and fetal pigs floating dreamily in clouds of formaldehyde.

_Just like Nick, _he thought for no reason at all, and shuddered.

He pushed the thought away and turned his mind to Grissom's parting comment. That he and Grissom would return to the matter of his wedding band and the Creeping Menace of Cross-Contamination was a certainty. While all of the other CSIs had patted him on the back, raised a toast to a long and happy union, and taken turns admiring his wedding band and making ancient but good-natured cracks about the old ball and chain, Grissom had merely raised his eyebrows speculatively over the rims of his glasses and eyed the ring in stone-faced silence. The first rumbling of discontent had come a week later, and they had been at surreptitious loggerheads ever since.

He was not particularly surprised by Grissom's reaction, nor was he offended. It was simply Grissom, pragmatism and logic, and in his world, there was no room for such trivialities as instinct or emotion or frivolity. Life existed to be studied and dissected and carefully classed, not lived and experienced and savored in all its colors and textures and subtle hues. Love and marriage and human connection were human constructs, and he had no need of them beyond passing clinical interest. He was a Vulcan in pressed chinos, and in his more whimsical moments, Greg suspected he slept with his eyes open. After all, what need did the dead have for slumber?

If Grissom had been aloof, the rest of the team had been pleased, if not a little hurt that they had been kept in the dark. He still winced to think of Catherine's exclamation of surprise when she had caught sight of the golden band during a coffee break in the staff lounge, breathless and fumbling and disbelieving.

_Greg, is that what I think it is? _she had said blankly as he stirred cream into his cup of Blue Hawaiian. She had crossed the distance between them in three brisk strides and bent to look at his hand.

_Eighteen carats of gold and holy matrimony, _he had replied breezily, and she had gaped at him as though he'd informed her of his election to the Papacy, mouth working as she struggled to gather her scattered thoughts.

_What? How? When? Where? _A rapid-fire litany, and she had shaken her head in a pendulous arc and switched sides in rhythm to her queries, and her hands had tugged fruitlessly at the air in front of her, a twainer gathering coils of rope. And then had come the question of questions, with a bewildered, beseeching wail and a petulant stamp of one flat-soled foot. _For God's sake, _who

_A gentleman never marries and tells. _He had waggled his eyebrows and hoped that would be the end of it, but her outburst had drawn the others to the room, and within moments, he had been besieged with outthrust hands and pats on the back and jovial inquiries. Even Hodges had ventured out of the Trace lab, test results clutched in one gloved hand. Ecklie had not been far behind, but his only contribution to the merry hubbub had been a terse "Get back to work."

And thus, his secret was out. Greg Sanders, former lab rat and spunky hedonist, was a bachelor no longer.

In retrospect, he supposed it would have done no harm to let them in on his secret, to flaunt his joy and his courtship as he flaunted his spiked hair, abominable fashion sense, and love of all things punk. Catherine had never been secretive about her failed romances or her daughter, and Nick and Warrick had often shared idle chatter about girlfriends come and long gone. It was the stuff of friendship and camaraderie, and he counted the team among his closest friends.

But for all of that, he hadn't told a soul. Not his father, with whom he rarely spoke, and not his Papa Olaf, who still puttered about his farm in Wisconsin, and who still called him every Christmas to ask if he'd gotten the cheese log he'd sent and regale him with tried-and-true secrets of Homje virility, and not his co-workers.

He could not say when the secrecy had started, or why. It was not born of malice or of shame, and now that the truth was out, he had no compunction about answering questions about his wife. It had simply happened, one second of omission into another, until it had become unbreakable habit. The silence had grown comfortable, and when the rare opportunity to confess had presented itself, he had let it pass.

_That's a lie on both counts_, said the amiable, gruff voice of Papa Olaf inside his head, and in his mind's eye, he saw him beside the barn in Wisconsin, dressed in his biballs and flannel shirt and beaten straw hat, gnarled, work-roughened hand wrapped around the shaft of a pitchfork embedded in a rick of sweet hay. A piece of hay protruded from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes narrowed in a perpetual squint.

_You made the decision to keep her a secret the moment you fell. She was your treasure, your quiet pleasure. The first time you met her, she made you laugh until you had to make a mad dash to the restaurant bathroom with tears streaming down your face, and on the second date, you didn't make it at all. You sat on the lakeshore and howled, and when you could see, you waded into the lake to wash. The third date came, and the fourth, and every time she made you laugh, you rediscovered the joy uncovering the sins of your fellow men had stripped away._

_By the tenth date, you had made up your mind, and you put away any thought of introducing her to the others. As good as they were, as steadfast as they are, they are tainted with the cloying reek of putrefying flesh and the echoes of untold depravity. They carry the stink of Luminol and Ninhydrin in their clothes and in the follicles of their hair, and despair and jaded cynicism has marked them with lines in the corners of their eyes and grooves in the downturned corners of their mouths._

_She was clean and she was pure, and when you buried your nose in the hollow of her throat, she smelled of soap and sun and juniper. You were afraid that if you brought her to the lab or introduced her to Nick or Sara or Warrick, the smell of corruption and too much knowledge of the evil that men do would be passed to her, and the thought of rolling over in the night to find the piquant odor of disinfectant nestled in her hair made your stomach heave. She was yours, and you were damned if you'd see your private oasis polluted._

_So you requested two weeks' personal leave, and since it was the first leave you'd ever requested in six years, Grissom approved it without asking why you needed it. You flew her to Palo Alto that Friday, and by Monday morning, you were standing before a justice of the peace in your rented suit and telling a wizened Mr. Magoo that you did and you would. Friday night, you took your husbandly privileges in a Westin on the beach, and Saturday afternoon, you took her surfing for the first time and watched the fire dance in her hair._

_You took two weeks in the sun and sand and learned how to breathe again, and when the wheels of the plane touched down in Vegas, the twinkling lights of the Strip felt, for a moment anyway, like home. The next day, you went to work, and the only evidence of what you had done was the ring on your finger and the three-by-five photograph wedged into the door of your locker. There would be no fodder for Sara Sidle's perniciously wagging tongue. You were gregarious, not stupid, and you learned your lessons well._

He didn't need to ask what Papa Olaf meant by that. His cheeks still burned with mortification every time he remembered how casually Mina had tossed off the comment about his virginity, the glibness with which she had told him of Sara's treachery, as though the discussion of such private subjects was as common as breath. He had slunk away, face crimson beneath his blonde-tipped spikes, and resolved never to discuss his personal life again.

"More fool, me, as Papa Olaf would have said," he sighed, and peeled off his gloves.

He threw them into the bin marked _Biohazard_ and kneaded his nape with one hand. The argument with Grissom and the subsequent soliloquy by Papa Olaf had given him a headache. It coiled at the base of his skull in a hot, throbbing knot and jabbed its sizzling tines into his temples in time to his heartbeat. He closed his eyes and inhaled the cool, inorganic, sterilized air of the lab. It tasted of alcohol and formica and the flat ozone tang of fluorescent lighting, and he scoured the tip of his tongue over the backs of his teeth to rid them of the taste.

He went to the counter on the other side of the room to get another pair of gloves and sanitize his hands. He had lost the thread of the song he'd been humming earlier, but he started another as he reached up and opened the cabinet that housed fresh gloves and the various kits a CSI in the throes of evidence-gathering might need. His fingers danced over the neatly stacked boxes of swabs and lancets and pipettes and SART kits and glided over the smooth domes of Luminol and canisters of Ninhydrin.

The gloves were in the furthest corner, and as he pulled them forward, his wrist jostled an unfamiliar bottle, and his brow furrowed at the muffled rattle of the contents, maracas in cotton batting. He set the box of gloves on the counter and groped among the shadowy confines of the cabinet until his fingers curled around what was unmistakably a pill bottle. He pulled it out and read the label.

"Excedrin," he muttered. "Must be my lucky day." He eyed the bottle in contemplative silence for a moment, and then unscrewed the cap and shook two of the innocuous white tablets into his palm.

_Could be poison, you know, _said the voice of prudence inside his head.

He stared at the pills in his palm. "Guess we'll find out." He shrugged and popped them into his mouth.

His tongue recoiled from the anise and lemongrass bitterness, and he swallowed with a grimace. "I sure could use a spoonful of sugar to help that medicine go down," he told the empty room, and replaced the cap on the bottle with a careless twist of his wrist.

He set the bottle down on the counter and made a mental note to remove it from the lab when he left. The cabinets in the laboratories were strictly for the storage of testing supplies and kits, and using them for storage of non-essential or personal items was strictly forbidden. Grissom would sprout an ulcer if he caught wind of it.

Greg smirked as he turned to the sink embedded in the center of the countertop, and opened the tap. They had circled neatly around to the topic of Grissom again, and he was not surprised. Grissom was the nexus from whence the rest of the lab had sprung, and he permeated every aspect of it. He was in the obsessively stacked boxes of swabs and the perfectly aligned manila envelopes. He was in the mandatory updating of personal information every thirty days, and in the nauseating specimens that often turned up in the staff refrigerator.

And in the astronomical success rate of the lab, though Conrad Ecklie would vigorously dispute that.

In his rare fanciful moments, he imagined that Grissom had _made_ the lab, simply willed it into existence with the indomitable power of his will. It had sprouted from his head in a miraculous conception, whole and flawless and fully stocked with all the provisions and nostrums the arcane magic of forensics required. It was his castle, his plaything, his child of plaster and linoleum and glass, and it thrived or languished as he did, linked by an umbilicus time could not sever.

It was a lovely, poetic sentiment, but it was all bunk. The institution that he now ran with an inscrutable gaze and a whisper like a velvet hammer had existed long before he had, and it would exist long after Grissom had become a repast for the bugs he so admired. It was an institution built upon regulations and forms and unceasing bureaucracy, and it was a changeling that reflected the face of its caretaker. It held no loyalty, and it did not mourn, and when Grissom was dust and bones and fading memories beneath the scorching Nevada sun, it would embrace another without shame.

_Waxing poetic tonight, _murmured Papa Olaf, and he snorted in wry acknowledgement of the truth as he soaped his hands from fingertip to wrist. He took special care to soap his wedding band and the pale circle of flesh beneath.

_There, Grissom,_ he thought smugly. _Can't complain now._ He turned off the tap with his elbows and pulled a fresh pair of gloves from the box.

_He just might, and what will you do if the memo comes down?_

He would cross that bridge if and when he came to it, but until then, the ring stayed. It was not religious conviction that cemented the ring to his finger-as a boy, he had been ambivalent on the matter of God, and after a year as a CSI, he was convinced that if God had ever trod the paths of heaven, he had abandoned them long ago-but a moral principle he could not shirk. He had invested three hundred dollars and his heart in it, and to so casually divest himself of an object he had sworn before a dozy California magistrate and two witnesses to cherish as Grace had slid it home with trembling fingers smacked of faithlessness, and of all the epithets that had ever been hurled at him, faithlessness had never been counted among them.

Speaking of Grace, he should call her soon. When he had left her, she had been seated at the computer, crutches propped against the side of the desk, splayed fingers flying over the keyboard in a mad dash to finish a copyediting job before the deadline. It had been all he could do to steal a kiss as he was bounding out the door, and odds were that she was sitting there still, hunched over the keyboard, cramping fingers slower but no less determined as she corrected mistakes with a stroke of the keys. It was likely she was also steadfastly ignoring the need for a shower or a bathroom break.

There was no need to call her. She was more than capable of puttering around the apartment without help, and even if she had stumbled or fallen, her personal attendant would be there with her until he-Greg-got off shift at eight in the morning. He would make sure she didn't slip in the shower or faceplant into the pot of boiling water on the stove, and when he came home just after sunrise, bleary-eyed and exhausted, he would find her at the kitchen table, clutching a mug of Blue Hawaiian and surveying him from behind her glasses.

But he fretted. As fiercely independent as she was, the instability caused by her ataxic Cerebral Palsy made her vulnerable, and fatigue and stress redoubled the effects. Sometimes, he came home to find her swaying drunkenly on her aluminum crutches, lurching and stumbling as her sleep-deprived brain tried desperately to decipher signals passed through damaged circuits. One leg would swing stiffly out, locked at knee and hip, and the crutch would follow suit, planted on the ground by arms trembling with exertion. The other foot would drag dispiritedly in pursuit of its fellow, and red-rimmed eyes would narrow with white-knuckled determination. It was a Herculean struggle between God's blunder and her unquenchable will, and more often than not, he watched it in silence. It had only taken once to learn that Grace would brook no pity.

But sometimes, he could not stop himself, and on those nights, he scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom over her slurred protests. She had her pride, and he loved her for it, but he had his limits, and he would not watch her struggle against her body and her vanity when he could prevent it with half a dozen strides and the crooks of his arms.

He would tuck her into bed, and in the quiet of their room, he would slip off his clothes and climb in beside her, and even as he mouth produced a litany of reasons why he had no right to coddle her, her body would tuck into his and her face would nestle in the curve of his neck. Ever the dutiful husband, he would grunt noncommittally at her drowsy tirade and let his fingers drift over the delicate crown of her head until her voice tapered into the soft sussurating sighs of deep sleep and her taxed muscles twitched and contracted to dreams of running without fetters. Only then would he bury his nose in the soft fire of her red hair and let the scents of woodsmoke and autumn leaves and determination deep as the marrow lull him to sleep.

It was fear, not pity, that lead him to call her every night during his shift, and it was fear that loosed demons of every stripe upon his imagination and made him see her splayed and helpless in the shower, one leg bent at an impossible angle and her crutches just beyond the reach of her wet, grasping fingers. It was sweet and sharp as addiction, and no matter how often he told himself that it was all nonsense, that the aide was there to protect against such an eventuality, the doomsday scenarios grew more gruesome in the spinning. The compulsion always won, and it gave him no peace until he heard her voice on the line, pleased and more than a little perplexed.

It was already there, nestled at the base of his spine like the promise of a cramp and tingling in the pads of his fingers. He flexed them to quell the persistent prickling itch of anticipation and thrust his hand into the glove pinched between thumb and forefinger. Anxious as he was to make certain that his wife's brains were not currently trickling down the shower drain in lazy, sinuous whorls of blood and tissue, he had a job to do. He snapped the latex tightly around his wrists and went back to the sheet that had become Mr. Proulx's shroud.

He was still at it ninety minutes later when Nick sauntered into the room, case folder tucked jauntily under one arm. "Hey, Greggo. Still at it?"

Greg straightened with a sigh and winced as several vertebrae crackled in protest at the sudden change in position. His eyes were hot and raw inside their sockets from endless staring, and he resisted the desire to rub them with the backs of his fingers.

"Yeah. The great scavenger hunt continues, but I'm almost finished. Just gotta swab a few suspicious stains and run ALS over the sheets to be sure I didn't miss anything."

Nick gave a derisive snort. "Hotel sheets like that, they'll light up like the Strip, man. Even swanky turns to spanky."

"The wit and witticism of Nick Stokes."

"It's true. Get anything interesting?" Nick drew nearer for a better look.

Greg shrugged. "Nothing that jumps out at me, if that's what you're asking. A few short and curlies, what looks like a nasal contribution, and a fingernail. As soon as I finish up, I'll take the whole kit and caboodle over to Hodges."

Nick's lips puckered in disgust at the mention of nasal mucus. "Nice."

"Who's taking a star turn in your armpit?" Greg nodded at the file folder peeking from beneath Nick's underarm.

"Nobody. Details on a B and E I'm working. No DB, just lots of broken glass, a missing stereo, and no viable suspects."

"Thrilling."

"Trust me. I've had more thrills on this job than I ever wanted. I'll take a nice, calm B and E any night of the week."

An awkward silence ensued. Nick's trials and tribulations were the stuff of CSI lore, and though the younger techs and dayshift employees discussed his travails with avid glee, they were anathema to those who knew and worked with him. None of them wanted to be the one who tipped his emotional fulcrum past the breaking point. Sixteen months after his entombment in a Plexiglass casket, he swore he was fine, and he smiled too much and laughed too loudly and too long, and though they knew it for a lie, they all smiled and nodded and told him they believed him, and when his back was turned, they shared conspiratorial glances and watched him from the corners of their eyes.

The silence spun out between them, and Greg suddenly found himself fascinated by the sheets that, five minutes before, he had sworn he never wanted to see again. He shuffled his feet and cleared his throat and fought the compulsion to drum his fingers on the table.

"Well, I'd better-," he began diffidently, and gestured feebly to the sheets.

"Yeah, I need to file this report." A quick smile stretched too wide and a voice too eager for the drudgery of the records room and its chronicles of lives cut painfully short.

_The dead have no eyes to see and no tongues with which to speak, _said a cold, brittle voice that brought hard knots of gooseflesh to the nape of his neck, and he fiddled restlessly with the adjustable neck of the magnifying glass, fingers throttling the narrow stem.

"Be my guest," he said, and was surprised at how shrill he sounded.

The disturbing, fragile grin remained firmly in place, but Nick's eyes flickered briefly to his coiled, crushing fingers, and for an instant, Greg saw a memory dancing in them, a rippling of shadows in the brightness of the room. Then it was gone, smothered by the forced jollity that was now as much a part of him as the Texas twang that occasionally reared its head when he was angry.

"Later," Nick said, and touched two fingers to his forehead in mock salute as he spun on his heel and departed.

When he had disappeared around the corner, Greg released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding and groped for the protective goggles and the slender wand of the ALS light. Work would distract him, lull him into the numbing stupor of routine. Not for the first time, he wished for the blare of the radio and the pop and crackle of static from speakers pushed just beyond endurance. Sound and fury soothed him and made the time pass more quickly.

_As soon as I get all trace to Hodges, I can call Grace._ Buoyed by the prospect of her quiet voice, he donned the protective goggles, turned out the lights, and went to work.

Forty minutes later, he was burdened with dozens of trace envelopes and the nauseating knowledge that Nick had been right in his crude assessment of the hotel sheets. Under the eerie glow of the ALS light, he had discovered thirty-seven biological secretions invisible to the naked eye. Either Mr. Proulx had the sexual stamina of a crazed wildebeest, or the swanky did equal spanky. Neither possibility was pleasant to consider, and he made a mental note to bring his own sheets the next time he traveled.

_Imagine the mattress, _Papa Olaf mused genially.

_There_ was a train of thought he had no intention of pursuing, please and thank you, and he pushed it away as he swung into the murky lair of David Hodges, Trace tech and mealy-mouthed sycophant extraordinaire.

"Sanders. To what do I owe the pleasure?" Hodges spared him a cursory glance over the top of his microscope, a wet mount slide balanced delicately between his fingers.

"Trace from a suspicious circs case."

Hodges gave a melodramatic sigh. "My work is never done. Put it over there, and I'll get to it when I can." He flapped a dismissive hand at the teetering mound of evidence bags and trace envelopes on the edge of his workspace. "Did you ever notice that people in this town never have the decency to die during daylight hours or in manageable numbers? Why can't Aunt Mabel go into that good night at four in the afternoon, when somebody else is on shift?"

Greg stared at him, torn between revulsion and dumb incredulity. _He's a black hole of egotism_, he thought numbly, and turned to go.

"By the way, Sanders, how is that hot little redhead of yours?" Sly, and possessed of a subtle derision that grated his flesh like sand.

Hodges was the last person with whom he wanted to discuss his Grace. _Get bent, Hodges,_ he started to say, and then an image arose in his mind of the delightful conference that would take place in Grissom's office if he and Hodges went to sword point, and ground his teeth against the invective. He had no desire to explain himself to his boss under the cloudy gaze of dead fetal pigs and squirm while Grissom surveyed him with that unsettling, doleful expression that never failed to cut him to the quick. Besides, obnoxious as the question was, he could prove no insult.

"She's just fine," he answered stiffly, and left before Hodges could pursue the subject.

He hurried to the locker room, which was quiet and mercifully deserted, and ensconced himself at the furthest end of the furthest bench. He pulled his cell phone from the breast pocket of his shirt, flipped it open, and dialed home. Now that the moment of furtive contentment was at hand, his heart was lightened, and he began to hum again, a tuneless, meandering lilt of his own invention. The muffled burr of a phone ringing sounded in his ear, and he smiled in anticipation of the click that signaled a successful connection.

_Time to put the bogey to bed for the night, _he thought, amused. _The ritual habitual. We'll play our roles and invoke the sacred, protective magic of same old, same old. As long as we stick to the routine, everything will be all right. The monsters can only get you if you stray from the path. That's why most people die in the dark._

As a criminalist, he knew the folly of such a notion, but it was a comfortable humbuggery, and so he did not banish it. He shifted on the bench and tucked the phone between his chin and shoulder. The phone rang a third time and then a fourth, and experience told him that Grace would not be long in coming.

_She'll be fine. She'll answer the phone and snort her disapproval of my coddling into the receiver, and after a few minutes of idle chatter and lovers' teasing, she'll hang up, and I'll go back to the grind, secure in the knowledge that when I get home, she'll be waiting for me with a cup of Blue Hawaiian, Chinese takeout, and a smile. I'll eat, and she'll filch my eggroll, and then we'll go to bed, not necessarily to sleep. So it has always been, and so it will always be, world without end, amen._

He was still telling himself that as the phone rang for the fifth time and the sixth. He lifted his foot and inspected the sole of his shoe, and in his ear, the insectile buzz of the phone continued. Seven, eight, nine. He switched the phone to the opposite ear and lifted his other foot for inspection. Ten, eleven…

"C'mon, Grace," he murmured, and fought the urge to squirm.

_She's probably in the shower. You did say she had contracted a serious case of body funk. If she's in the bathroom with the shower going, she'd never hear the phone. Relax. It's all good, _soothed the voice of reason inside his head.

Twelve, thirteen…

_Where is the attendant? _prodded the insidious, brittle purr of doubt. _Why doesn't he answer?_

_In the bathroom, making sure she doesn't slip in the shower and win the Grand Quadriplegia Sweepstakes, _retorted reason irascibly. _Which is_ _precisely where he should be. _

The voice was right, of course; everything was copacetic at Casa Sanders, and there was no use jumping at shadows. Grace was fine, a grown woman, and if anything catastrophic had happened, her attendant would have called him immediately. He knew the man had the numbers of both his personal cell and the lab's front desk because he had programmed them to speed dial himself.

He broke the connection and slipped his phone into his pocket again. He would try later. He had evidence logs to file and crime scene photos to look over, and he was sure Sara could use an extra hand sorting the evidence from her case, a triple homicide in the back alley of Amici's, a high-end watering hole for celebrities, politicians, and new-money high-rollers.

_And it will keep your mind occupied._

He lasted twenty minutes in the company of Sara Sidle and a pile of bloody clothes before he was in the hallway, pacing impatiently to and fro with the phone pressed to his ear. The headache, beaten back by the Excedrin hours earlier, returned, a hot, crushing hammerstrike at his temples, and each shrill keen of the phone was a dental-drill whine at its center.

His mind attempted to revive the ancient invocation of routine, but the reassuring lullaby cadence of the thought was drowned out by the frantic yammering of his instincts.

_She's not all right, _they gabbled, a high, reedy wheeze that made his teeth ache. _She's not all right, and you know it. That's why you're pacing the halls like an insomniac on a sugar high and paying more mammon to the great god, Verizon, than you can well afford. That's why the dread has settled over your stomach in a greasy pall and the hackles are stiff quills on the back of your neck. It's that same sense of foreboding that strikes just before you push open the door to a crime scene. The realization of death starts from the ankles up. It creeps over the toes of your shoes and curls its greedy fingers over your calves and scrotum. By the time the door has swung in its wide arc and shown you the twisted bodies on the floor, the air is heavy in your lungs and settles around your heart in a rancid caul. You've got that feeling now, heavy as iron in your bones, and soon you're going to have the pork-fat tang of rot in your mouth._

"Get a grip," he told himself, and was alarmed to find that his voice was not quite steady. He cleared his throat to banish the tremor in his voice. "Too many horror movies and too much caffeine." He took a deep breath. "She's fine. She's just in the shower, or maybe she fell asleep." There. Calm. Sensible.

_Oh? That's an awfully long shower, especially for her. She likes the terra firma beneath her wobbling feet, and the shower, with its puddles and steam and promise of traction, is a place visited cautiously and quickly. And where is the attendant, the erstwhile soul in whose charge you placed her? Maybe he skipped shift. Or maybe there are darker deeds afoot._

Greg snorted at the crude insinuation and dismissed it as quickly as it formed. Rufus Goodman had been Grace's aide since the day she'd been brought home from the hospital in a pink receiving blanket, and he would sooner chew off his own arm than raise a hand to her. He was her companion and her confidant, and Greg suspected that he knew more of her secrets than anyone else. Wherever Grace went, Rufus followed.

_Then where is he? _insisted the voice.

He could find no answer, and the phone continued its strident bleating. He shuffled from foot and foot and wished he had a stick of gum to chew or a swatch of fabric to knead and squeeze, an outlet for the nervous energy that vibrated in his nerve endings, the sizzling thrum of a tuning fork. A passing ballistics tech spared him a curious glance as she swept by, lab coat flapping. He offered her a lopsided grin that felt like a grimace, and he turned away before it could become a rictus.

_If her trusted aide hasn't seen fit to rape and murder her, the option it leaves is no less unpleasant. _The voice was dispassionate and absolutely pitiless. _It means that she's lying in the shower, leg twisted beneath her, while the water beads on her forehead and rills around her motionless body. If you're lucky, she's only fractured her skull, but if you're not, her eyes are open and unseeing, heedless of the blood that's mixing with the water and sluicing down the drain in a merry gurgle. You'll come home and find her weeping from eyes that can no longer cry._

The imagination that was so handy when he was curled on the couch in his socked feet with a bowl of buttered popcorn, watching horror movies and stealing glimpses of Grace's hair by the dim, grey glow of the television, was now a torment, and it showed him the doomsday scenario with hellish, unflinching clarity. He saw her eyes, wide and opaque as whitewashed windows, and her face, pale as porcelain and just as lifeless beneath the water's onslaught. His fingers were curled so tightly around his cellphone that the casing gave an ominous creak.

_How many rings is that now? Twenty? Thirty? How many more until the connection is broken by the phone company?_

"Greg? Earth to Greg." Sara's voice from the laboratory, ten feet away and impossibly distant.

He jumped, startled by the intrusion into his reverie, and closed his cell phone with a snap.

"Are you going to help me or not?" Waspish and exasperated.

He blinked at her in momentary befuddlement and shook his head in an effort to dislodge the haunting images. They went but grudgingly, and he could feel them on the periphery of his consciousness, biding their time and groping among the recesses of his mind with slender, tenebrous fingers.

_Christ,_ he thought stupidly. _Was that Excedrin in that bottle or LSD?_

He realized Sara was staring at him through the glass wall of the laboratory, eyebrows raised in mute inquiry and lips parted to reveal the gap in her front teeth that was quintessential Sidle.

"Yeah, I'm coming," he muttered, and went inside the lab. His cell phone was still clutched in his right hand.

"She must have you on a tight leash, Greg," she said as he returned to his place at the table.

"Sara, do I look like the kind of man to be at the beck and call of a woman?" He offered her a cocksure grin, but it felt alien and too heavy on his face, and he stopped.

Sara let out a huff of amusement. "Do you really want me to answer that? The male ego is a fragile thing, and I wouldn't want to shatter it." She bent to examine the tattered edges of a bullet hole in the bloody shirt she was holding.

He fashioned his expression into one of wounded indignation. "Please. _I_ am a free spirit, beholden to no one. And, I'll have you know, I am a fabulous catch."

Sara flashed him an impish grin. "I take that back. She's not shattering it; she's inflating it."

"Amen." He had meant it to sound fervent, a holy roller preacher in the throes of revival, but am image arose in his mind of Grace in the shower, a twisted, broken doll from which all life had fled, and the shout emerged as a weary, distracted murmur.

Sara paused in her inspection of the bullet hole and peered shrewdly at him. "Hey, Greg…are you all right? You seem a little spacey."

"Yeah, I'm good. I'm just tired, that's all. Married life's giving me quite the workout, if you know what I mean."

She rolled her eyes. "That is a visual I so did not need. Thank you, Greg." She bent to her work again.

_Join the club, Sara. I've got a veritable parade of fun-filled visuals to ponder,_ he thought grimly, and reached for an evidence bag.

His feigned equilibrium lasted three minutes. He left the lab in the middle of combing a pair of socks for stray fibers, all but deaf to Sara's squawk of confusion. This time when he called, he let the phone ring until the operator disconnected him, and with every unanswered ring, the blood that swirled down the shower drain of his grim imaginings grew brighter, and the gurgling of the water in the drain became mocking laughter. His heart was triphammering in his chest, and his tongue was small and hot inside his mouth.

_Get a grip,_ he told himself for the second time that night, but there was no force behind it. The phone he held to his ear was silent save for the uneasy, sibilant hiss of static, but to close it would be to bow to the inevitable, and so he let it stay where it was.

_You've got a decision to make, _said Papa Olaf. _Standing in the hallway, clutching a cellphone isn't doing anyone any good, and if Grissom happens around the corner and sees you busily engaged in the Devil's idleness, you'll never hear the end to it. And if Grace really has fractured her skull in the shower, each second you delay carries her one step closer to Charon's ferry. Pick a path, Greg, my boy, and travel it well._

He was tempted to leave the lab without a backwards glance and race home to check on her himself, but prudence rooted him to the spot. If he left the lab and nothing was amiss, he could expect a furious reprimand from both Grissom and Ecklie and ran the risk of termination for gross dereliction of duty. He was also painfully aware that he was in no condition to drive. If he got behind the wheel now, his fellow CSIs would be scraping him off the pavement with wooden spoons.

Salvation came in the guise of Detective Jim Brass, who wore the care of years like a well-worn suit. Time and trial and too many crime scenes had etched deep grooves around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, but his eyes still danced with grim humor, bright and alert despite the hangdog expression that rarely left his face. He was marching stolidly in the direction of Grissom's office, leather notepad in hand. He was no doubt on his way to fill in Grissom on whys and wherefores of the corpses on Doc Robbins' slabs.

_Grace will kill you for this,_ whimpered a dolorous voice inside his head, and in his mind's eye, he saw her answering the door in her pink, terrycloth bathrobe, swaying drunkenly on one crutch while she struggled to keep from subjecting the bemused Captain to an unintended display of her still-damp cleavage. Beneath the wet mat of red hair, those green eyes would be polite and inquisitive, but when he returned home, the stumping of her crutch on the kitchen floor would be the tolling of the doomsday bell.

_Water gone from white to the pale rose of blooming dawn to the scarlet of irrevocable end. That's what you'll find when you open the door tonight. How many heartbeats will it take, and how many have you wasted in your indecision?_

That decided him, and he fell into step beside Brass. "Hey, Brass."

Brass spared him a sidelong glance as he trudged along, and his lips twitched. "Hey, Greg. Slow night?"

"Not really." It dawned on him that his cell phone was still attached to his ear, and he closed it with a conscious effort of will. "Listen, uh, can I ask you a favor?" He quashed the urge to fidget.

Brass quirked one bushy eyebrow, but he did not break stride. "Sure. Shoot."

"I was wondering if you could drive by my apartment. Grace-that's Mrs. Sanders, in case you were wondering-usually takes a shower after I leave for shift, and I always call to be sure everything's all right. It's probably nothing, but she's not answering. I mean, she's probably just out with an old college friend or cleaning out the vast Sanders fortune and heading to the Tangiers, but she's not all that stable on her feet on account of her…well, you know, and I'd just feel better knowing it was a telephone line that went down and not my wife." He was gabbling, and he knew it, but it was safer than silent contemplation of the grinning horrors capering across the canvas of his tortured imagination.

Brass stared at him with a mixture of wry amusement and bewilderment. "All right, Greg. Take it easy. Just let me poke my head into Gil's office for a minute, and I'll get right on it."

_How many heartbeats?_

He rested his hand on the crook of the detective's elbow, the fabric of his cheap, wool suit rough and dry beneath his hands. "Actually, I was hoping you'd go now."

There was a protracted silence, and he could feel the weight of Brass' gaze as it took in his pinched face and the untidy spikes of his harrowed hair.

"I'll go now. The folks on this who's-who list have a standing reservation with Doc Robbins." He held up the notepad he carried. "I'll let you know what I find. Chances are, your better half is safe and sound." He slipped the notepad into the breast pocket of his suit, offered him a weary, two-fingered salute, and spun on his heel.

"God, I hope so," Greg said when he was out of earshot, but when he turned to rejoin Sara in the lab, his bones were iron inside his flesh, and in the back of his mind, he wondered what it would say on Grace's toetag.

Jim Brass was as good as his word. Twenty minutes after he had left Greg Sanders standing in the hall at the CSI offices, he was in his Tahoe, driving over the mist-slicked asphalt toward the Blooming Cactus Apartments, where Greg made his home. The lateness of the hour and the uncharacteristic mist that fell in a fine, blanketing drizzle ensured that the roads were as deserted as the desert through which they so rudely intruded, and the winding expanse of black ribbon illuminated by his headlights was unbroken by man or beast or gas-guzzling automobile.

The solitude and silence were soporific, and he turned on the radio to combat the seductive caress of Morpheus' treacherous fingers against his eyelids. The shift was fresh, but he was not, and the three hours since he had clocked in had passed in an eternity of bookings and arrests and investigating the outraged accusations lodged against the fine citizens of Las Vegas by tourists and those unfortunate enough to call it home.

For the former, it was a glittering wonderland of possibility, an oasis that summoned them with the lure of instant wealth. It was illicit passion and the smell of sex and cigars. It was limousines and showgirls and high-profile mobsters in Armani and suede shoes. It was the shrill wail of the jackpot and the exultant chuckle of the roulette wheel, red and black and blackjack paradise, a bacchanalian grotto to be taken or left as they pleased. It kept their secrets and its counsel, and in return, they sang its praises on the shuffleboard courts of Miami.

But it held secrets of its own, possessed a face that was not so inviting or sweet. Beyond the gaudy splendor of the Strip, the shadows were darker and thicker. They swept over the red rocks and the lifeless hardpan of the desert in abetting river and smothered the plaintive cries of the discarded. Showgirls ten years past their prime slept in the alleys behind the clubs they once headlined, everything sagging except the breasts five years of tips had paid for, and strippers who had never tasted the bright lights turned tricks in the parking lot beneath the glare of sodium lights that revealed every line and blemish. If they were lucky, there was no light at all. Only the shadows, pitiless and watchful.

And when the city of one hundred thousand lights did slip and offer up one of her unsavory truths, it fell to him to pick of the pieces and set the alluring façade to rights. He had been doing so for twenty-three years, and if high blood pressure or a bullet didn't put paid to his well-laid plans, he would be at it for another ten. After that, he intended to pull up stakes and retire to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where the only flashing lights came from the fireflies hovering over the lake.

Until then, however, he was the watcher in the dark, and tonight, as happened on far too many nights, he had seen too much. The night was young by Vegas standards, and he had already been called to a homicide and a suspicious circs. He had jotted down names and interviewed sobbing relatives and potential suspects, and behind the impassive gaze, his mind was a whirl of names and dates, vague details delivered in quavering voices, and the jolly stipple of blood spatter on stucco walls.

And Greg Sanders' pinched face.

Experience told him that Mrs. Sanders would be just fine, woozy and puffy-eyed from sleep and peering myopically at him from the doorway. He would introduce himself, and her lips would whiten and thin with apprehension until she heard the reason for his visit, and then she would laugh, roll her eyes, and assure him that all was well in the Kingdom of Sanders. They would shake hands, and he would go back to the car and phone Greg with the good news. Jim Brass, knight-errant and his sister's keeper.

_If you believe that, why are you driving to his apartment in the middle of the night?_

_Because it's Greg, and because he's never asked a favor of me in the seven years I've known him. Not so much as a _bring me a cruller_, and if he feels the need to have me call on a wife none of us have ever seen save in the photo on the inside of his locker, then it matters. And because after Nick, we all sleep lightly. _

_Maybe Mrs. Sanders is being swabbed for DNA by the guy across the breezeway, _sneered a cynical voice inside his head, and an unwilling chuckle escaped him.

It wouldn't be the first time that had happened. The grind and long hours of the job gobbled up marriages and spat them out again. Husbands spent more time in the embrace of the dead than of the living, and wives, tired of staring at the emptiness on the other side of the bed and the stink that never washed out of the sheets, found solace where they could.

_You know all about that, don't you, Jimbo? You came home one grey dawn to find your better half busily accepting a special delivery from the U.S. Postal Service with sweat on her thighs and another man's name on her lips. You stood in the doorway and watched the bed rock to a rhythm that was not yours. She was so absorbed in who she was doing that it was almost over by the time she saw you, and what stings all these years later is the expression on her face. _

_It wasn't shame or horror or even frozen incomprehension, but annoyance that you should be intruding on her liaison, as though you were an interloper who had no right to be there. Even after, when the man had gone with stammered apologies and a bundle of rumpled uniform shirt in his hands, and you were alone with her and the sour tang of foreign sweat, there was no regret on her face, only bitter truculence and dull fury that she should have been so rudely interrupted. You opened your mouth to speak, but there was nothing to say, and so you closed it again and studied the phone, which was off the hook and lying beside the bed like a throttled red snake. Then, you closed the door behind you and went to stay at the nearest motel. Nine months later, there was another special delivery at Desert Palm Hospital, and neither of you mentioned it again._

His chest ached at the mention of Ellie, his prodigal daughter. The thought of her brought no thrill of paternal joy. The years had been too unkind and the secrets too bitter. There was only sadness, deep and throbbing in his bones, and he wondered where she was now. The last he had heard, she was adrift in New York, bartering her body for a bed and an ounce of crack.

It hurt to think of her, and he was grateful when his headlights swept over the sign heralding the entrance to Greg's apartment complex. He turned into the lot and parked between a Cadillac Escalade and a Ford Pinto that had seen far better days. He killed the ignition, and then he sat in the dark and silence for a moment, willing the images of Ellie and her weariness-bruised face from his mind. Unlike the Ellie of flesh and blood, who fled from him as quickly as she could, the specter did not go willingly, and it was five minutes before he was composed enough to get out of the car and cross the dark, wet parking lot.

It was seventeen minutes past one in the morning, and most of the windows in the building were blind and slumbering, though a few emitted the faint blue glow of late-night television. He straightened his coat, patted his breast pocket to be sure his badge was there, and walked to Building Thirteen, the clack of his shoes preternaturally loud in the stillness.

As he made his way to Unit A, he pondered what the elusive Mrs. Sanders would be like. Greg had never discussed her beyond bland mundanities, not even what she did for a living, and his uncharacteristic reluctance to speak on the subject had inspired no end of idle speculation. Archie Johnson was convinced she was a club-hopping, punk royalty diva, and Grissom had once jokingly ventured the idea that she didn't exist at all, that she was a creature entirely of Greg's creation.

_We'll find out in a minute._

He raised his hand to knock on the door of the apartment, pleasantry already on his tongue, and then stopped. The door was ajar. Not much. Just a hair. The greeting died on his lips, and his loosely fisted hand dropped to his side and reached for his gun. The hairs on his nape prickled with a sudden surge of adrenaline.

_I don't think Mrs. Sanders just fell asleep on the couch, _whispered the soft, fatalistic voice of instinct inside his head. _Oh, no. Something wicked this way came._

"Shit." It was almost a moan. "Mrs. Sanders?" he called. "This is Jim Brass, Las Vegas P.D. Can you hear me?"

He strained his ears for the furtive sounds of movement-the stealthy scrape of footsteps, the click of a hammer being pulled back, the gurgling, wet rasp of bloody breathing-but there was nothing, and his stomach rolled uneasily in its moorings. He raised his gun and took a deep, steadying breath.

_Please, God, _he thought as he prepared to open the door, _don't let me find her dead on the floor with her brains gluing the back of her head to the carpet or her panties bunched around her ankles and a kitchen knife in her gut. If something wicked did happen here, don't make me be the one to tell Sanders. There isn't enough booze in the world for that._

He pressed the tips of his fingers against the door and pushed it gingerly open.

No nightmare scenario greeted him, nor did a killer leap from the shadows. The room was lifeless as a crypt and just as lightless. The sway of darkness was absolute and cloying, unbroken even by the glow of a television set. Vague shapes loomed in tiny dunes and hillocks, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw a coffee mug on a small worktable in the near corner of the room and the square outline of a laptop.

"Mrs. Sanders?" He stepped over the threshold, and his foot trod upon something soft and springy.

He looked down, and for a lunatic instant, he thought he had stepped into a pool of blood. Then he realized that it was a bouquet of long-stemmed, red roses. They had been heavily trampled, and the petals were scattered over the floor in a delicate blanket of bleeding red and green stems.

He stepped over them and groped for the light switch, his mind screaming all the while that he was contaminating the crime scene. It was true, but he had to see, had to know the worst. The switch tripped with a sharp _click,_ and light flooded the room.

It was empty, but not undisturbed. An office chair was overturned, and papers were strewn over the floor. The phone squatted on the table, one edge hanging off the end in defiance of gravity.

_A red phone, _thought with idiotic fascination. _It's always a red phone._

He shook himself and continued his assessment of the scene. There were shards of broken glass under the table and a damp spot on the carpet. There was a red smear nearby, and there was no hope that it was rose petals. It was too wet. He swore under his breath.

There was something else, too. Two of them, actually, and he stared at them for a very long time. A pair of aluminum, cuff-lace crutches sprawled in the middle of the room, ends akimbo, the untidy legs of a drunk who has temporarily forgotten how to walk.

Comprehension dawned. "Oh, Greg," he said. He was seized with the sudden urge to sit and put his head between his knees, but instead he walked from room to room in the small apartment, praying to find Mrs. Sanders huddled in the bedroom or in the hall closet, but the bedroom was as empty as the living room, and the only things he found in the hall closet were bed linens, towels, and a lightweight, titanium wheelchair painted canary yellow. He stared at the latter in sloe-eyed bewilderment.

"Shit." The single syllable fell like a pebble from his numb lips.

He reached for his cell phone and dialed a number. "Gil," he said quietly into the receiver. "We have a problem."


	2. The Long Walk

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, events, and locales are property of CBS and Jerry Bruckheimer. No copyright infringement is intended, nor is any profit being made. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders belongs to me. ©La Guera, 2005.

The Scripture Grissom bastardizes in this chapter is John 15:13 and was taken from the King James translation.

Wang Chung was a popular 80's pop band. Their hit was-oddly enough-"Everybody Wang Chung Tonight."

There were, Grissom thought as he stood behind his desk with the phone clutched in his hand and the voice of Jim Brass in his ear, two types of deafness. The first he had known all his life. It was the creeping silence that had stopped his mother's ears when he was a child and threatened his own when he became a man, and it had made conversation an art of the hands rather than the lips. He had never liked this deafness, but it was familiar, and he had grown accustomed to it with time.

The second kind was a deafness of the mind, an inability of the brain to process the information passed to it by the ear, and from that he had never suffered. His mind was as acute as his ears had been dull, and he had made a career-a life, if he was to be completely honest-of understanding and deciphering the meanings and unspoken truths hidden within each word, even the ones left unspoken. He understood the secret language of bugs. He also knew the tongue of Luminol and ANT. His ears were trained to hear their voices.

But try as he might, he couldn't grasp what Brass was telling him. He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose as if the thin, wire frames were the source of interference and said, "I'm sorry, Jim. Can you repeat that?"

Brass' voice on the other end of the line, mournful and ineffably weary, repeated its message as clearly as it had the first time, and still the words made no sense. He blinked, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and switched the receiver to the opposite ear. Maybe if he kept moving, they would come into focus. He reached for a ballpoint pen on his desk, hesitated. Picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up again and turned it in his palm, end over end. Put it down.

_Feng shui for criminalists. Everybody feng shui tonight, _he thought dumbly.

_Wang chung tonight, _corrected a helpful voice inside his head.

His mind tried to pursue that ridiculous line of thought, but Brass was obviously waiting for a response, and so he pressed his palm to the desktop to stay its frenetic, mindless groping. "I see," he answered at length, and then, because that brusque declarative seemed woefully inadequate in the face of overwhelming silence, "How bad is it?"

"There's no body, if that's what you're asking, but there are signs of struggle, and there is blood on the floor."

The momentary relief he had felt upon hearing that Grace Sanders was not sprawled and stiffening at Brass' feet curdled in his veins and settled in his stomach in a hot, greasy ball of apprehension. He tightened his grip on the phone to anchor himself to the reassuring confines of his office.

"Enough to be fatal?" His voice was flat, clinical.

The line crackled as Brass considered the question. "No, but that doesn't mean much."

Grissom said nothing. There was nothing _to _say. Brass was right. Even a small wound could be lethal if not treated promptly, and for all they knew, she could be bleeding internally or bleeding out by degrees in the trunk of a car while her abductor sped across the cracked desert hardpan, listening to Led Zeppelin on the radio and tapping his palms on the steering wheel.. Death by septicemia or gangrene or death by exsanguination were the most likely threats, and both were prolonged and excruciating ways to die. He stared mutely at a fetal pig as it bobbed serenely in its womb of glass and formaldehyde; it seemed to smile jauntily at him, a Delphic oracle and its goggling supplicant, and he dropped his gaze to his desk and the small dune of papers scattered over it.

_Imagine the fun you'll have breaking the news to Sanders, _jeered a voice inside his head. _You can sweep into the break room or the DNA lab or the evidence room like a crazed Monty Hall and offer him the choice between Door Number One and Door Number Two, each its own hellish showcase of possibility. _Hello, Greg. By the way, Brass went to check on your wife. He didn't find her, but don't worry. He did find this ominous bloodstain at the scene for you to analyze. Oh, and Greg? Put a rush on it.

"No, he can't," he murmured softly. "Conflict of interest."

_Unless she turns up in a few hours with a bag of takeout and a wound that required stitches, this entire lab is about to be embroiled in a conflict of interest, not to mention a media circus. You and Ecklie will be staving off the barbarians at the gate with forceps and Bunsen burners before the end._

He stifled a groan at the thought of Ecklie. He would have to be told, of course. As the Director of Forensics Laboratories, he oversaw all media relations, and much as he loathed the man's shameless gladhanding of politicians and craven indifference to the onus his machinations placed on the lab, he needed his constant mugging and bizarre moxie in front of the cameras so that he-Grissom-and the rest of the shift could do the grunt work of finding Greg's wife before the blowflies did.

_You're going to handle it, are you? After all your talk of conflict of interest? Why not let the day-shifters or the swing-shifters take the case? They've the same training and the same tools. They can dig and sift and label baggies as well as you can, and none of them have a vested personal interest. He is one of them, but he is not of them, and they will feel no connection with him apart from the ID on his coat. They won't be plagued by the thought of hair coaxed into angles and points that would make Euclides scream, nor will their nostrils be haunted by the scent of hair gel and Right Guard. No emotional baggage. Clean and by the books. Just the way you like it._

All sensible, and it was the advice he would have given himself before the phone had rung with the shrillness of a scream and wakened him from his comfortable, clinical drowse and thrust him rudely from the realm of the theoretical into the harsh, unforgiving light of the practical. But he knew even before the thought had faded that he would not heed it.

Greg was his, had been his since the day he had joined the night shift team with his blue lab coat and his gregarious smile and his music that made ears ring at forty paces and bleed at twenty. So were Catherine and Warrick and Sara, and Nick, who had forgotten how to relax. Archie and Hodges were his, too, though he would not don sackcloth and ashes if the latter someday found greener pastures under Ecklie's baleful eye. They had entrusted him with their lives when they joined his team, and they were his responsibility. He had already lost one on his watch, and last year, Nick had nearly joined Holly Gribbs in the pantheon of CSIs lost. Calamity would not strike thrice. Not his people.

_And if worse comes to worst, and we find Grace's remains in a shallow grave in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, picked clean by the birds and the grubworms and covered in leaf litter, I don't want that bastard Ecklie to be the one to hand Greg her underwear, wedding ring, and personal effects in a bag marked _EVIDENCE_. It would be…indecent._

_ Well, if she is dead, _whispered a tenebrous voice at the base of his skull, _you won't have to harangue Greg about his wedding ring anymore._

He gaped, appalled by the cold pragmatism of the sentiment, but before his conscience could remonstrate, Brass spoke.

"I'm waiting on your call, Gil." Then, softly, "Jesus." It was despairing and incredulous, and Grissom knew exactly how he felt.

He exhaled through his nose and gathered his scattered thoughts. "Secure the scene, Jim. I'll get there as soon as I can. Ecklie needs to be informed."

Brass gave a sympathetic grunt. "I'm on it." A pause. "Hey, Gil?"

"Yeah?" He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"You gonna tell Sanders the bad news before or after you examine the scene?"

"I-," He replaced his glasses. "I'm not sure yet."

_I don't want to tell him at all. I am a scientist, a creature of sterility and fact and empirical data that does not blanch when presented with a brutal truth. I am not accustomed to empathy or tact. Let Catherine be the one to tell him, with her mother's gentle compassion, or Warrick, or Sara, who can rightfully call themselves his friends. If I break the news, it will inevitably sound like I'm reading from a forensics casebook._

_ You're his supervisor, _his conscience said with implacable finality. _He's your responsibility._

Yes, he was, and never had that fact rested so heavily upon his shoulders or over his heart. He quashed the impulse to remove his glasses.

"I think it would be best if I told him before. Otherwise, he might try and go with us. Having night-shift work the case could be construed as a matter of necessity, but any lawyer with his degree could contest evidence collected by a victim's spouse."

The line was silent save for the hum of a live connection, and Grissom knew the detective was struggling for the right words, or indeed, any words at all. There was a crackling rush of spent breath, paper grazing plastic. "This one's not going to be easy, is it?" Brass asked at last.

"No, it isn't," Grissom answered, and hung up.

"Shit." The expletive was a harsh plosive in the sepulchral quiet of the office. It was a word seldom passed from his lips-he considered profanity the last refuge of the desperate and the ill-spoken-but he could find none more apt to the situation in which he now found himself, and in truth, it was oddly comforting to know that the power of speech had not deserted him entirely.

He wanted to sit down and think, to take a moment to catch his breath and order his disarrayed mind, but his legs felt heavy and wooden beneath him, and he was afraid that if he sat, he would never get up again. He would simply sit in his chair like a broken doll until the day shift arrived and found him there, Grissom turned to a pillar of salt for his hubris.

He plucked a manila folder from his desk without really seeing it, tucked it beneath his arm, and headed for the door. He would tell Ecklie first. It was the lesser of the two evils set before him, and once the inevitable histrionics and desk-pounding hysterics over the chaos into which Grace Sanders had so thoughtlessly plunged the lab by disappearing were out of the way, he could concentrate on the task of telling Greg without bungling the affair too badly.

_Not much chance of that, is there? _sneered a laconic voice inside his head. _Let's face it, old friend-you've lived with your bugs and your pigs and the solitude of floors that have only known the tread of your feet for so long that the connections that bind you to your fellow man are threadbare and fragile as dust and old lace. The few occasions on which you have tried to set aside the mantle of your self-imposed exile from the human race have ended in disaster. There was Terry, whom you drove away with the incessant demands of the beeper, that jealous mistress who gives you neither rest nor leave, and Lady Heather, who was a casualty of your congenital suspicion._

_ And Sara, whom you know loves you with every fiber of her being, but for whose love you would have to forsake all that you have worked so hard and so tirelessly to achieve. She is everything that you need and all that you dare not allow yourself to have, lest it all be lost in an instant. Rather than make peace with the consequences of your choice, you tell yourself that you have not chosen at all and barricade yourself behind your spotless, white walls and your bookshelves full of science and rational prose. It has been so long since you have experienced vulnerability that its presence in others unsettles you._

_ If you are an island unto yourself, then Greg is youthful exuberance made flesh. He has dreams and chases them with abandon because it has never occurred to him that he might not attain them. The statistics tell him that he will live 78.4 years, and with less than a third of that behind him, he does not see the end, even though the job he has chosen makes it clear that the end is but a breath away. He revels in every taste and touch and whisper in the dark. He loves whom he will without thought to what may come, and when he saw the one in whom he could find a clean, well-lighted place, he pursued her without hesitation and won her hand, and you envy him his fearlessness and absolute surety that it will be all right._

_How ironic it is, then, that your worst fears have come to pass, but it is not you who will suffer the consequences. You could have survived it-probably would. The stoicism you developed as a boy, biting your tongue until it bled to keep your silence while children and people who should have known better hurled insults into your mother's face because she could not hear them, has served you in good stead. It would shield you from the gall and the wormwood bitterness until the worst had subsided and there remained only a diffuse melancholy and a smug sense of justification._

_ No, the cup has passed from you and on to Greg's lips. You're just the harbinger, and when you deliver your message, the last of his innocence will wither._

He did not want to ponder Greg or Sara, and so he strode from his office, intent on getting to Ecklie's office before the full reality of the situation struck and rendered him either inert or agog with rage that his lab, his people, were being targeted for the second time in a year by the cruel whims of fate. His lips thinned, and he set his chin as he walked.

He was half a dozen paces from his office when Sara appeared, brow furrowed and lips pursed in an expression of grim determination. His countenance remained impassive, but behind the cool façade, he suppressed a twinge of irritation. A harangue on the inadequacy of her latest assignment was the last subject he wanted to discuss. He quickened his pace and pretended to check his watch.

Sara was undeterred. "Grissom, we need to talk," she declared.

"Sara, not now."

A disgusted huff. "Yes, now. Greg is acting really strange, and it's freaking me out."

That caught his attention, and he stopped in mid-stride and turned to peer at her over the rims of his glasses. "Strange? How?"

"Well, for starters, he offered to help me process evidence from my triple and then wandered out to use the phone in the middle of examining the bloody shirts recovered from the scene. It was mildly amusing the first time, but now I'm ready to strangle him. He's gone out five times in twenty minutes, and every time he comes back, he's more agitated. He's practically breakdancing around the lab table. Grissom, he's totally spaced on me; he's examined the same bullet hole three times. If he keeps it up, there's a serious risk of cross-contamination."

Grissom eyed her in silence for a moment. "Then why did you leave him alone with the evidence?"

She opened her mouth to reply, and then shut it with a snap. "You know what?" Her lips twitched in a wry, humorless smile. "I'm going to go back there and make sure Tweak doesn't investigate us into a lawsuit." She turned to go.

"Sara?" It was little more than a whisper, but it carried effortlessly in the hallway.

She paused. "Yeah?" Carefully neutral, but traces of self-deprecation lingered in the downturned corners of her mouth.

"Go tell Greg to take a break. Then, I want you to get Nick and Warrick and Catherine and meet me in Ecklie's office in ten minutes. Be discreet. Come up one at a time or in pairs, not in a herd. I don't want to attract attention. It might be best if you didn't all use the same means to get there."

Curiosity and confusion supplanted irritation on Sara's face. "What? Why? What's going on?"

He held up his hand to stifle the torrent of questions. "Sara, please. Just do as I ask."

She opened her mouth to launch another volley of queries, and then closed it again and threw up her hands. "Okay. If this is another one of your experiments, I don't get it. What about Greg?"

"No." It was sharp, much sharper than he had intended, and he blinked in surprise. "No. Not yet."

Sara stared at him in mystified silence from behind half-lidded eyes, cheeks hollowed and lips puckered in mute speculation. Adrenaline and worry had sharpened his senses to almost painful acuity, and the fuschia of her lipstick was a vivid slash on her pale face. He could smell the faint tang of her soap, crisp and piquant in his nostrils, and his eyes were drawn to the flutter of her pulse in her neck. She radiated vitality, and it danced over his skin, the needling quicksilver of static electricity.

_Too close, _he thought wildly. _She's too close. _His musings in his office had clearly unmanned him, and he was sure that if she touched him now, he would recoil. He was not ready for this, for any of this, and he was feverish and ungainly in his own skin.

"Hurry, Sara," he said, and was surprised at how calm he sounded. He had never felt less in control in his life.

She regarded him for a moment longer, and then she turned and strode in the direction of the break room, shoulders squared and brown eyes crackling with purpose. When she had rounded the corner, he took a deep breath and continued his grim trek to the elevators and Conrad Ecklie's office.

At quarter to two in the morning, the elevators were the last bastion of solitude in the bustling offices and facilities of the lab, and when the doors slid closed behind him, he was not surprised to find he was the sole occupant. He pressed the button for the third floor and sagged against the cool, steel wall. There was a vertiginous lurch in his stomach as the elevator glided upwards and he closed his eyes to regain his equilibrium.

_Now, Gil, pull yourself together, _said a voice inside his head, a voice he had always associated with his mother, though he could not say why. His mother had never uttered a word that he could remember. Her hands had been her voice, and she had no need for bilabial fricatives or glissades and sibilants. Inflection was carried in the speed and fluid grace of her hands, in the pop of a knuckle or the smack of fingers on meaty palm. When he was a boy, she had the power to reduce him to shamefaced tears with a look and a few furious arcs of her gesticulating hands.

_It was the voice you secretly wished she'd had, _whispered the stark, insouciant voice of honesty. _She was an excellent mother, and her hands were always tender when you had a scraped knee or a bruised elbow, but the silence as she held you close and stroked your hair always left a hollow place that her fingers couldn't fill. Just once, you wanted to hear her call your name, even in anger. Or better yet, to hear her laugh. But such longing was treacherous to such a good mother, and so you never said a world, your lips as sealed as her ears. You said nothing, and you invented a voice in the one place it could exist._

_ All this pontificating will get you nowhere, Gil, my boy, _the mother-voice was saying now, and in his mind's eye, he saw the white blur of her hands as they danced upon the air in front of her and spelled out the words her mouth formed.

_Only fools fret at what hasn't happened yet and what might never come to pass. It's a waste of time and energy, and you know better. You always have. You were always questioning, always so practical. You drove the priests mad with your solemn skepticism. Fra_nkly, _I'm surprised you weren't excommunicated. You were a scientist by the time you were eight, and the only faith you had was in what you could see with your own two eyes. Do what you've always done. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. It has never steered you wrong._

The evidence. The invocation of that holy grail of forensic science loosened the burning knot of tension in his chest and between his shoulder blades. Of course, the evidence. The evidence was reliable and unassailable, and once he and his team had processed the scene, the truth would out in a scrap of fabric or a swab of biological fluid.

By the time he stepped out of the elevator, he had regained his aplomb. His racing mind had settled, and he had retreated to that quiet place where emotions and attachments fell away and left only hard science and a case to be solved. His stride was buoyant as he opened the glass door to Conrad Ecklie's ivory tower. The game was afoot, and he would not be thwarted.

Warrick was waiting for him in the vestibule outside Ecklie's inner sanctum, picking aimlessly through the magazines fanned on a squat glass table. From her desk in the opposite corner of the room, the dour, hawk-faced secretary was surveying him with baleful suspicion, as if she expected the lanky CSI to abscond with the July 1987 issue of _Modern Toxicology Review._

Warrick looked up at the sound of the door. "Yo, Gris," he said, and tossed the magazine aside. "Sara told me to meet you here. What's up?"

"I'd rather not say until we're all here," he said quietly.

Warrick's amiable grin faded. "Something tells me we're not here to discuss a fat pay raise."

"No."

"Damn."

The secretary glowered from behind her Formica-and-particleboard battlement, but said nothing. The glass door opened and Catherine entered, followed by Nick, who was inexplicably clutching his field kit in white-knuckled fingers. He nodded at Grissom over her shoulder and tugged compulsively at the bill of his hat.

Catherine sauntered over, hands in the pockets of her slacks. "Hey. Where's the fire?"

Grissom shook his head. "Not yet. We're waiting on Sara."

Catherine blinked in surprise and pulled a hand from her pocket and swept a stray wisp of hair from her forehead. "No Greg?"

His lips thinned at the mention of Greg's name, and Warrick and Catherine exchanged blank looks.

"Mr. Grissom, can I help you?" The secretary scratched her narrow nose with one lacquered nail and jabbed a pencil into the electric sharpener just out of sight.

"No, I don't believe you can," he said mildly, and she tutted in indignation.

Sara arrived a few moments later, breathless and flustered as she darted through the door. "Sorry I'm late. Had to dodge Greg. Grissom, he is seriously on the edge of a breakdown. A few more laps around the lab, and there'll be a groove in the linoleum."

Grissom made no answer. He was already stalking toward Ecklie's door, the manila folder now held in front of his chest in a lunatic impression of a medieval breastplate.

_Tally ho, _he thought grimly, and opened the door without knocking.

"Conrad, we need to talk." The door struck the office wall with an unceremonious crash, and behind him, the secretary scrambled from her desk with a shrill oath.

"Mr. Grissom! You can't just barge into-," she chided him, and jostled through the throng of CSIs congregated in the doorway. Her glasses were askew, and she righted them with a defiant jab of her index finger.

Grissom ignored her and focused on Conrad Ecklie, who was gazing at him in mute stupefaction.

"Gil, what the hell are you doing?" Ecklie asked at last. "Last I checked, the rules of decorum still applied to you, and you don't barge into someone's office without knocking." He rose from his chair, and his eyes drifted over the other CSIs huddled in the threshold. "And why are they here?" he demanded.

"Conrad, I don't have time for decorum. I have a problem."

"A problem?" He ran a hand over his bald pate. "Well, so do I, Gil, and it's called a 'budget,' and before you stormed my office with a forensic raiding party, I was preparing a proposal to the budget committee to explain why we need an additional million dollars a year. If I don't get that million dollars, you don't get your toys. So, why don't you and your merry band get back to the lab before another section blows up under your watch?"

There was a furious huff from Catherine, but Grissom stayed her rebuttal with an imperceptible shake of his head. _Not now._

"I tried to keep them out, sir, but _he_ ignored me," the secretary offered, and favored Grissom with a gelid glance.

"Greg Sanders' wife was abducted from their apartment," he said flatly.

"It's not your fault, Helen. He does this all the ti-what?" Ecklie's irritation dissolved into dull-eyed incomprehension.

"Greg Sanders' wife was abducted from their apartment."

"Helen," Ecklie said slowly. "Close the door."

Helen retreated with a murmur of assent, and the door snicked closed behind her. Ecklie looked helplessly around the room, threaded his fingers behind his head, and wandered back to his desk, where he sat with dreamy slowness.

There was a thunderstruck silence. Warrick leaned against the wall with a shuddery intake of breath, and Nick swallowed with an audible click. "Oh, man. Oh, oh, man." His fingers tightened around the handle of his field kit with an ominous creak.

"Oh, Jesus, Gil." Catherine, who had moved further into the room with the departure of the secretary and the closing of the door, sank wearily onto the arm of a chair, hand pressed to her mouth.

"Shit," Ecklie said with dismal finality, and scrubbed his face with his hands.

_There seems to be a lot of that going around, _Grissom thought nonsensically.

"Wha-" Catherine had found her voice again. "When?" She ran her fingers through her hair and let her hand fall to her lap with a disconsolate thump.

"We don't know. Right now, we think it was shortly after he left for work." From the corner of his eye, Grissom saw Sara reach absently into the pocket of her blouse for a cough drop.

"Anything probative at the scene?" Ecklie was slumped at his desk, and his fingers kneaded his temples as though they pained him.

"The door was ajar when Brass arrived to check on her, and there was blood at the scene."

Sara closed her eyes, and from his corner, Warrick gave a low moan. Ecklie said nothing. He simply opened the topmost drawer of his desk, reached inside, and withdrew a bottle of Tums.

"Enough to suggest lethality?" he asked in a flat, distracted tone. He shook a Tums into his palm and popped it into his mouth with a quick flick of his wrist. In the silence of the room, the crunching of the tablet between his teeth was as the treading of bones underfoot, and Catherine, hunched and oddly vulnerable on the arm of the chair, shuddered.

"Again, I don't know. For all we know, the blood could belong to the perpetrator. Brass secured the scene, and he's waiting for us to move on this."

Warrick straightened. "Then let's roll, man. Time's wasting, and standing around here with our jaws on the floor isn't gonna help anybody."

"Damn right," agreed Nick, and jaw set and eyes flashing, he started for the door.

"Whoa, whoa," Ecklie called from behind the desk. "There is no way I am letting you guys handle this."

Warrick rounded on him. "Why the hell not?" he demanded. "We're the best CSIs you've got."

"Do you have any idea how big a conflict of interest it is for a team to work a case involving one of its own members?"

"That's B.S.," Nick snapped. "We've worked cases involving each other before, or don't you remember Krissy? I was a suspect in that case, and I was still on the job. Or how about when-,"

Nick's mouth worked as he struggled with his reluctant tongue, and Catherine placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Grissom was sure he wouldn't be able to say it, sure that the wounds from his premature burial were too deep and too fresh, and then he did.

"-when I was buried in a Plexiglass coffin under six feet of dirt in some plant nursery? Where was the conflict then?" He glared defiantly at Ecklie, who returned the look with stony equanimity. "This whole lab galvanized, from the first-year techs to Grissom, and if they hadn't, I'd be a headshot on the Wall of Heroes in the hallway. This team and these people saved my life, and Greg deserves the same chance. Let's stop screwin' around and get out there and find her."

_God bless you, Nick, _Grissom thought, but his face remained impassive.

Ecklie's only response was a derisive snort.

"Unless you want to call in an outside forensics team and the FBI, we don't have much choice," Grissom pointed out before Nick could retort.

_Ah, Confucius, what perilous waters he doth tread._

"The Feds are a given anyway if this is an abduction. You know that." Ecklie groaned, no doubt overcome with nightmare visions of the federal agents who would descend upon his stronghold of bureaucratic influence like locusts and strip away his autonomy until he and his underlings were little more than disgruntled, impotent onlookers with laminated name tags.

"Technically, we don't know that it's an abduction," Grissom murmured.

"What?" Ecklie, Warrick, and Nick chorused. Warrick was surveying him in squint-eyed amazement, head cocked, as though he-Grissom-had suddenly announced an aversion to bugs and logic.

"Gil, what-?" Catherine began, but he overrode her with an upraised palm.

"It is entirely possible that she just fell inside the apartment, was injured, crawled outside, and was taken to a hospital by a passerby."

_Horseshit _was writ large on Ecklie's face, and Warrick's expression of utter befuddlement only deepened.

"You don't believe that," Ecklie said baldly.

"No, I don't," he admitted. "But neither do I have evidence to the contrary, and until I do, it's a theory I have to consider."

"We don't have any evidence because we're playing political pattycake," Sara muttered bitterly.

Grissom ignored her. "Since we have no conclusive proof of abduction, I see no need to involve federal authorities yet," he went on. "If it does turn out to be a kidnapping, it's going to be a very delicate situation for everybody involved, and if something goes wrong, it'll be the lead investigator who goes down. The last thing the lab needs is to lose its director with all eyes on us. You do what you do best, Conrad, and I'll do what I do best-collect the evidence."

"It certainly isn't brown-nosing," Ecklie sneered, but there was no venom in it, and his eyes sparkled with reptilian cunning. _Ah, Grissom. Could it be that after all these careful years and all these meticulous jousts, you have misstepped at last and offered your neck to the hangman's noose? _

_ Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his career for his friends, _Grissom mused.

_I don't think that's quite how it goes, _whispered the pedant inside his head, and his lips twitched in a humorless grimace.

_Yes. It is._

Ecklie dropped his gaze with a sigh and shook another Tums into his hand. "You're on the case for now," he told the desk. "But the minute we find out it's a kidnapping and not a body recovery, the Feds are to be notified, and for God's sake, keep the media the hell away from this for as long as you can."

On that count, he and Ecklie were in perfect accord. "Understood. Thank you, Conrad."

Ecklie snorted and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. "Don't thank me until it's over. If you drop the ball on this…"

Grissom thought of Greg, who bounced on the balls of his feet when he was nervous, and who for seven months had possessed a quiet surety of the rightness of his world that he could only envy. He thought of the spiked hair and the jaunty step each morning when he clocked out and the wedding band he refused to remove in the face of possible sanctions.

"If I drop the ball, Conrad, everybody loses."

He left without awaiting a reply, but as Ecklie's door closed behind him, he heard the plaintive, maracas rattle of another Tums being shaken from the bottle.

When they had left the office and the flat-eyed glower of the secretary behind, Warrick spoke. "Well, there isn't going to be any ball-dropping if I can help it. Where do we start?" He clapped his hands together and shifted his weight from foot to foot with barely bridled impatience, a runner chafing at the invisible bonds of the starting block.

"I want everybody to get to Greg's right away. We've wasted enough time already. Catherine, Warrick, you're on point until I get there. Document everything-furniture, trace, footprints, tire treads. Nothing is too insignificant. Bag it and tag it and get it back to the lab. I'll be there as soon as I can."

Catherine blinked at him. "Where are you going?"

"To tell Greg," he murmured.

"Ah." A single, choked syllable. Her mouth worked furiously, and when her eyes met his, he saw the sheen of unshed tears. "Gil-I-do you want me to do it?"

_Oh, yes, I do, Catherine. Would that I could let this cup pass from me. _"No. I'll do it. I'm his supervisor." It fell from his lips like a confession.

She furrowed her fingers through her hair and mustered a wan, sad smile. "Just-be…careful. Be gentle."

He offered her a smile in return, a wistful cramping in the corners of his mouth. _Is there a gentle way to shatter someone's world?_

She tossed her head in an obdurate attempt to maintain her tenuous composure. "Yeah," she breathed. "Yeah."

She and the team went one way, and he went the other on the longest walk of his life, manila folder clutched in fingers he could no longer feel. Greg was sixty feet and two floors below him. It was a simple matter of stepping into the elevator, pressing the button, and letting it bear him unto Greg Sanders' pinched, expectant face, the bearer of bad tidings borne on the sleekest and quietest of wings.

He took the stairs.


	3. Vertigo

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, locations, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer and CBS. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders is property of La Guera (c) 2005.

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to review, and Happy Halloween.

"Greg."

He had always liked the sound of his name-well, the shortened version by which he went in all matters save legality. In the eyes of the law and the state of Nevada, he was Gregory Christopher Sanders, but no one had ever called him that except teachers calling roll and the justice of the peace in California who had asked if he would and did take Grace to be his lawfully wedded wife. Even his parents had forsaken the name they'd given him in favor of that cheerful, clipped syllable, though his mother still brandished it when he had fallen out favor, an ominous whipcrack of maternal disapproval.

"Gregory" was ponderous and somnolent, fraught with gravitas and the promise of a life weighted with onerous responsibility. It was the name of doctors and lawyers and saints, and of monks with bad haircuts and throttled libidos who spent their lives with folded hands and bowed heads and the heavy tread of those who were forever treading the upward path and lugging their blue balls behind them.

_Grace calls you that now and again._

But it was not so grave coming from her lips. It was often light and teasing and laced with a sultry burr that made his pulse quicken and his mouth go dry. It was poetry and invitation, an impossibly liquid sound for so harsh a word, all tongue and throat and erotic enticement. When he heard it, all other concerns evaporated in a surge of lust and a race to the bedroom.

An image arose in his mind of Grace tangled in the sheets and in his arms, face flushed and beads of perspiration in her hair. Fingernails down his back and sharp, white teeth nipping at his earlobe. Breath harsh and ragged amid the creak of bedsprings and the heated smack of conjoined flesh. Underwear dangling daintily from one small, flat-arched foot with toes that fanned and curled in time to his motion.

_Ah, Gregory, _whispered the Grace of couplings past, the words a moist tickle against the shell of his ear. It was amused and sly and beseeching, and heat rose in his neck and behind his ears.

But that magic, that right was hers alone. "Greg" was the name invoked by everyone else, a brisk, jovial name as buoyant and gregarious-pun worthy of Grissom damn well intended, please and thank you-as "Gregory" was dreary and stolid. It exuded ebullience and optimism. It was California sunshine and spiked hair and the mischievous, snaggle-toothed smile of a boy who had once spent his summers clambering over rocks and splashing in tide pools and reveling in the feeling of a boogie board beneath his tanned stomach.

And so, when it reached his ears from the doorway of the lab as he bent over a microscope he had long since ceased to see, he could not understand why it was so mournful, as though it were the name of someone dead, not alive and crackling with nervous energy. Bewildered, he straightened with a creak of popping vertebrae, rubbed his eyes, and turned to see Grissom in the doorway.

"Oh, hey, Grissom. What's up? I hope you don't mind, but I was helping Sara with that triple." He gestured unnecessarily to the microscope behind him with one latexed thumb.

Grissom made no reply. He simply stood in the doorway and stared at him, manila folder clutched in one hand. His face was pinched and wan, and the bruised pouches beneath his eyes were almost black. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it with a snap. Instead, he tucked the manila folder beneath his arm, removed his glasses, and began to polish them on his shirt.

_Never seen him do that before, _Greg thought uneasily. _He's a Kleenex man. _"You all right, Gris? You don't look so hot."

Grissom studied the languid circuit of his thumb as it guided his shirt hem around the perimeter of his lens. "Yes, she mentioned that," he said quietly. "She also mentioned that you seemed distracted."

Ah, so that was it. "Yeah. Sorry… It's just that I had an important phone call, but don't worry. I got Brass on an errand for me, and I'm sure it's all good." He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and bounced jerkily on the balls of his feet.

Grissom grimaced at the mention of Brass' name, and the cold finger of unease just below Greg's navel sharpened. The garrulous captain was one of the few cops with whom Grissom got along.

_Curioser and curioser, _he thought. _Was there another administrative dustup between the brains and the brawn?_

_What if it's over your little errand? _prodded a malicious voice inside his head. _Brass has hardly been a department favorite. In fact, he's been riding a desk since Holly Gribbs made her ignominious exit from the team in a body bag. Maybe his little jaunt on your behalf gave them more ammo._

"He's not in trouble, is he?" he asked anxiously. "I mean, I just figured-,"

"Sit down, Greg." It was soft and oddly tender, but it was also an undeniable command. Grissom was still cleaning his glasses with the fabric of his shirt, but his eyes were now on the clock mounted on the antiseptic, tile wall.

_Whatever he's going to tell me, I don't want to hear it. He's going to tell me that the monsters have come out of the dark, and if I see them, I won't be able to unsee them. Not for love or money or all the booze in Vegas. It'll be like that burn victim we found at the bottom of the ravine, burned beyond all recognition, a grinning skull with wide, living eyes. Sophia told me I would forget in time, that a cold beer and a night on the town would expunge the mental record, but she was wrong. I still see those eyes peering at me from that blackened face now and then. When I'm under stress, I dream of them and wake up with my heart lodged in my throat and one hand groping for the reassuring solidity of Grace on her side of the bed. No, I don't want to hear this._

But Grissom had asked him to sit, and the need to please Grissom was as ingrained as the need to breathe, and his feet obligingly carried him to a nearby wheeled stool. He lowered himself onto it.

He shrugged and interlaced his fingers. "What's on your mind?" His feet began to tap a rapid tattoo against the linoleum, and he forced them to stop.

Grissom shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and the soles of his shoes gave a demure squeak. His eyes were still fixed on the clock. "I got a call from Brass a few minutes ago." Diffident and prised from between teeth unwilling to set the words loose.

_I'm not going to ask,_ he told himself resolutely. _I'm not going to set these grim wheels in motion, because if I do, there is no telling where they will lead me before they stop. If I don't start, there can never be a finish. I'm just going to sit here and wait until whatever monster he has found shambles into the shadows again. It can't hurt me if I don't believe. That's the way the magic works. _

"And?" he heard himself say. It was faint and far away.

"Grace is not in the apartment, and the door was ajar."

"That's impossible," he answered conversationally. "Grace doesn't like to drive; she has a license to drive a modified car, but she's afraid she'll have an accident. If she goes out, I take her, or she calls a cab." He offered Grissom an earnest, so-you-see-she-can't-possibly-have-gone gaze.

_This is not happening, _declared a voice inside his head with the fragile composure of the condemned. _It's not. She's just in the bedroom or in the bathroom. Maybe she lost a pen under the bed and crawled after it._

_And stayed under it even after Brass came inside with gun drawn and loud proclamations of civil authority? Grace is a prankster and an occasional goof, not an idiot, _countered the ruthless logic that had once made the cold absolutes and algorithms of science poetry to his ears.

Now Grissom did look at him, and what he saw in those normally inscrutable eyes made him recoil on the stool. They were bleak and clouded with a pitying anguish that he had never seen in them before. The crows' feet around them had deepened in the hours since he had wandered into the lab to preach the parable of Pursuing All Avenues and Keeping An Open Mind, and even as they stared at one another across a gulf of inches, he could see Grissom fighting the urge to look anywhere else.

_Stop. Just stop, _Greg thought desperately. _Go away and take your bleak, unsettling eyes with you._

But Grissom did not go away. He said, "There were signs of a struggle. There was blood."

An involuntary moan escaped him. Blood he understood. Blood was life and death and his livelihood. Blood tinted the colors of his world-red and crimson and maroon. It was in the sunrise and the sunset and in the light behind his eyes as he slept, and before the Norplant device had nestled beneath the skin of Grace's left arm, it had appeared in the bathroom wastebasket and on panties hanging over the towel rack like a merry streamer six days out of every month. It announced both life and death in a gaudy smear, and beneath his microscope, it teemed with slow-killing toxins and diseases.

It was the alpha and the omega, the first and the last to God and science, but for all its variety and versatility, there was one inviolate law: to lose it was to lose life.

Grissom was watching him warily over the rims of his glasses. He clearly expected him to leap from the stool in a paroxysm of teeth-gnashing grief or fall upon him with bellows of outraged denial, and Greg didn't blame him.

But sitting beneath the bright lights of the lab and the cautious, miserable gaze of his supervisor with the reality of Grace's disappearance lodged in his gut like a broken blade, he was dismayed to discover that all the strength in his arms and legs had deserted him. They were boneless and impossibly heavy, as if blood had been replaced with mercury. He was sure that if he tried to leap from the stool, his legs would buckle and he would simply fold in on himself and puddle on the floor, a rag doll whose child-master had wearied of him in mid-play.

_Not a doll. A sloughed skin. Yes, that's better. Grissom likes snakes, too, right? Not as much as bugs, no, or bodies, but well enough. I'm a sloughed skin, and in a minute, I'm going to slither from this stool and lie here until someone comes along to sweep me up. So long, Greggo. Out with the old, in with the new._

He closed his eyes against a sudden wave of vertigo and groped for the edge of the stool with trembling hands. "How much?" His tongue was a stunned vole on the floor of his mouth, and the words emerged in a drunken slur.

Grissom's breath in the excruciating silence that pressed his chest in a rancid poultice. Then, "We don't know. Brass doesn't think it's enough to be lethal."

_Oh, there's a comfort, _he thought hysterically, and he fought the compulsion to cram his knuckles into his mouth and scream.

"Can I get you anything?" Grissom took a tentative step closer.

A brittle titter escaped him. "My wife would be nice." He ran his hand through his hair and swallowed with an audible click. "Oh, God," he said thickly. His stomach was slaloming in its moorings. He wanted to be sick, but pride would not allow him to splatter Grissom's shoes with the BLT he'd eaten for breakfast.

_Glad to see my priorities are in order, _he thought morbidly, and took a deep, shuddering breath to quash the hot, greasy ball of nausea that threatened to overwhelm him.

"We'll get her back, Greg," Grissom assured him, and strode into the room. He snatched the wastebasket from the corner and carried to where Greg battled his gorge. "Here." He thrust it beneath his chin.

Greg accepted it in silence with logy, clumsy fingers. It was mercifully empty. If he'd looked down to find a bloody wad of cotton batting, he'd have heaved his lunch, pride or not. Even the doughy smell of fresh liner made him queasy.

He grunted in inarticulate acknowledgement, and when he was certain that the parting of his teeth would not unleash a deluge of bile and partially digested bacon and tomato, he asked, "You're taking the case?"

A single, brusque nod. "Yes. I've already cleared it with Ecklie."

"Bet that was fun," he muttered. "I'll get my kit."

He tried to rise, but Grissom placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. "No, Greg."

He sank onto the stool again and swayed dangerously for a moment, clutching the metal rim of the wastebasket in a convulsive grip. "Why not?" Mulish and dazed.

"You're in no condition to be out in the field," came the maddeningly reasonable response, and the gentle pressure on his shoulder tightened.

It was true. His breath was choking, rancid gristle in his too-small throat, and his eyes were raw and throbbing in sockets that had suddenly grown a size too small. He blinked to bring the world into focus, and his eyelids scoured his corneas like sandpaper. He had lost all sensation from the knees down. He gave an experimental kick and watched in glazed stupefaction as his foot shot out in a sluggish arc and narrowly missed barking Grissom's shin with the toe of his sneaker.

_Yep, still mine, _he mused stupidly. "I don't care," he heard himself say. "She's my wife." The blunt blade buried just below his navel and winnowing deeper with every breath twisted savagely at the word _wife, _and the wastebasket rattled in his fingers.

"I know, and that's why you can't be anywhere near this case. Any evidence you collected would be tainted. I'm sorry, but it's a conflict of interest."

The quiet pity in Grissom's voice scalded him like acid. "Hey, Grissom?"

"Yes, Greg?"

"Did you ever notice what a bloodless fucking phrase that is?"

The hand on his shoulder disappeared, and there was an interminable silence. "Get some rest. There isn't anything you can do here. Go ho-,"

The word died in mid-syllable, and Greg looked up to see Grissom staring at him in stricken mortification. He closed his mouth with a snap and inspected the floor beneath his feet as if he expected it to open up and swallow him whole. Indeed, Greg suspected he would have happily welcomed it. It would have been funny if the world hadn't gone so irrevocably mad.

_Oh, but Grissom, I can't go home. Home is where my heart is, or was, before the darkness fell, and home is where I'd love to be, but it's your crime scene now, and I am forbidden to enter. Adam has been expelled from Eden, and Eve has fallen prey to the serpent. I can't work, either, because to work is to poison the fruits of your toil. I am nomad._

He offered Grissom a bleak, tight-lipped smile and slipped gingerly from the stool, lest his treasonous equilibrium fail him. The floor was oddly malleable beneath his feet, treacle and melting blacktop, but he maintained his balance and tottered forward.

"Here," he croaked, and thrust the wastebasket blindly at Grissom's chest.

He left him standing in the lab, holding the empty wastebasket in bewildered, fumbling hands, and shambled into the hallway on knees the consistency of warm tallow. His feet were wooden stumps on the ends of his stiff, scissoring legs, and his hip joints were loose ball bearings inside his pants. He felt ungainly and disarticulated, as though a curious but inept child had taken him apart and put him carelessly together again.

_I'm just like Pinocchio, _he thought with lunatic clarity. _Only my Gipetto went on a Bacardi bender and played the quarter slots all night instead of boning up on the instruction manual. Hot damn._

The light in the hallway was too bright, God's flashlight in his naked face, and he squinted against it. The vitality had been leached from his bones, and each shuffling step was as the shifting of mountains. He felt impossibly old, and he was seized with the compulsion to sit where he stood and curl up like a lost and weary child.

The CSI labs had always been cozy to him despite the fluorescent lights and sterile walls, a comfortable warren that was as familiar to him as his own skin. On slow nights as a DNA tech, when the PCR machine had been whirring in its secret, arcane language and the room had been too warm for comfortable habitation, he had often roamed the halls with his eyes closed and let his feet take him where they would, drifting to the discordant strains of Sigur Os inside his head.

Now, as he plodded aimlessly down the corridor, legs numb as stilts, the welcoming labyrinth had become a nightmare landscape of hallways and doors he could not remember, though experience told him he should. His feet carried him down paths he had taken a thousand times before, and yet there was no familiar groove where his feet should have gone, no memory of footsteps taken. It was as alien as the surface of the moon, and as he passed the DNA lab, the cramped cubbyhole in which he had spent six years, he stared at it as though he had never seen it before. Inside, Mina stood with a pipette in one gloved hand, squirting DNA samples into the proper testing slots.

She spared him a cursory glance as he approached, and then returned her attention to her delicate task. "Hello, Greg," she murmured. She did a double-take and set the testing kit on the table with a graceless flop. "Are you all right? What happened?"

_Nope, not all right, Mina. Not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I think I left myself back in the evidence lab with Grissom. He's got the trashcan, too, but I don't think he knows what to do with it. You might want to give him a hand. As for me, I'm just Hansel with no breadcrumbs, wandering in a deep, dark wood and trying to find the way home._

He knew he should say something, but his tongue was still insensate and stupid in his mouth, and his mind had temporarily forgotten the rules of proper social discourse. Besides, he didn't want to talk, to give voice to the terrible tidings lodged in his chest and brain like the furtive, insidious nuclei of tumors. He wanted to find a place to hide and sort the muddle of his mind into a semblance of order.

"You're dripping," he mumbled, and pointed at the pipette she held. In her worry, she had forgotten it entirely, and it dribbled its contents onto the counter.

She started with an oath. "Dammit! Greg, hang on."

But he was already retreating, slipping down the hall and beyond her reach. He walked without a clear destination, moving only to outpace the slow, asphyxiating coil of confusion and frozen grief massed in his chest like a cramp. His eyes burned, and he was overcome with the need cough or retch and expel the bitter clot of emotion in his throat.

Eventually, he found himself in the break room, staring numbly at the gelatinous, oil-slick sludge in the coffeepot and the cheap table where, on better, saner days, he had flirted with Sara and cadged Warrick's potato chips when he wasn't looking. He thought that now would be a good time to howl, scream, stomp his feet, and rend his clothes in a convulsion of grief like they did on those overwrought TV shows on Lifetime. Lord knew the grief was there, avid and ravenous and burrowing into his soft places with jagged, gleeful claws, but he could not, would not give it voice. He was drained and hollow, and even shuffling to a chair and plopping into it required more energy than he possessed. He swayed on his feet and stared bleakly at a chair that was three feet and ten thousand miles away.

"Get a hold of yourself," he rasped and scrubbed his face with his hands. "Everything is fine. It's-she just hurt herself and crawled outside to get help. Maybe Rufus found her when he showed up and took her to the hospital."

_Why hasn't he called to tell you, then?_

_Yes, Greg, you do need to get a hold of yourself, _agreed the voice of Papa Olaf. _You need to accept the fact that something bad happened in what should have been the safest place in the world. You're too smart to play dumb, my boy, and you've been at this job too long to pretend you don't know the evils that men do. You do know, and it plagues your dreams more than you care to admit. If your girl isn't in that apartment, it's because somebody took her from it, somebody who didn't care whether or not they hurt her. In fact, hurting her was probably exactly what they wanted._

Greg shook his head in time to his pounding heart. "No. Uh-uh. No way." He licked lips dry as parchment. "This is ridiculous. I'm not listening."

He stalked to the cupboards over the counter, jerked open a door, and groped among the shelves and assorted boxes of cereal and bags of chips until his gloved hand fell upon the coffee canister. Blue Hawaiian it wasn't, but anything to distract him from the dreadful, pragmatic voices in his head.

_You have to listen, _insisted Papa Olaf, hard as bedrock beneath the compassion. _Denying the truth won't make it any less so. Brass and the others are going to come back, and they're going to ask questions and tell truths that will rub rock salt into wounds that have no bottom. You have to be ready, Greg, or it will tear you apart. A man can lose his mind living in denial._

He shook his head more violently still, an animal whine of fear and furious intractability in his throat. His hands trembled as they fumbled with the plastic lid on the canister.

_You knew this would happen, didn't you? _whispered _a _scabrous, accusatory voice, hard and grating as the rolling of bones. _That's why you kept her so private, secreted away in your cramped apartment like priceless treasure. You were afraid that the shadow that fell over the diseased minds of the criminals you brought to justice would stretch forth its weightless, tireless fingers and seek her out. Sometimes when you sat on the witness stand in a wool suit that chafed your skin and clogged your nostrils with the smell of respectability and mothballs, you looked into the eyes of a man who had butchered his wife and three children with a hacksaw and saw the malignancy there, a sly, cunning darkness that made your flesh crawl. You saw it and thought of Grace, defenseless in spite of all her bravado and independence. You swore that evil like that would never find her._

And so, you made sure she never came within a thousand miles of what you did. She never waited for you outside the courtroom when you testified, never dropped by the lab to chat or bring the dress socks you left on the dresser. You took great pains to ensure that no predator confined within your plexiglass cages ever had the chance to mark her as prey because you knew that there were worse fates than fracturing your skull and breaking your leg in the shower.

_But someone slipped through your defenses._

"N-n-," he began, but just then, the plastic lid slipped off the coffee canister, and the smell of coffee struck his nose.

It was coffee and nothing more-earthy and rich, turned earth and spring rain-but he recoiled, stumbling away from the counter on unsteady legs.

_Not coffee, _gibbered his shocked mind. _Graveyard dirt. Won't it feel nice sifting through your fingers as it patters over Grace's coffin?_

His knees unhinged abruptly, and he sat down on the floor with a teeth-rattling thump.

"Oh, Gracie," he moaned, and buried his face in his hands.


	4. Voyeurs and Castles in the Sand

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of CBS and Jerry Bruckheimer. No profit is being made, and no infringement is intended. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders belongs to me. (c)2005

A/N: Thank you for all the kind reviews, and thank you, Waywardangel, for pointing out that the DNA tech's name is Mia, not Mina, as I had thought.

Catherine Willows was on intimate terms with the nature of voyeurism. As a child, she had often gazed wistfully toward the glowing horizon and the beckoning lure of the Strip and told herself that when she grew up, she would be a showgirl, with a dancer's lithe legs and perfect teeth and shimmering costumes fit for a princess. To her naïve, little-girl's eyes, they had been living Barbie dolls, flawless and ageless and destined for a Prince Charming to come and sweep them away to live in a castle in the clouds.

She should have known that the dreams she harbored and nurtured in the quiet cool of a bedroom decorated with too much pink were not to be. Life's harsh lessons had been all around her, etched in the lines of her mother's face as she waited for a phone call that seldom came and in the red, accusatory ink of the final notices that often came in the mail and signaled another week of macaroni and cheese and cold butter sandwiches. She should have trusted the evidence, as Gil always said, but she had been a child, and hope died hardest in the hearts of the young. So she had clung to her dream with the tenacity that would one day become her trademark, and the occasional visits by Sam Braun had only stoked the fires.

If she had known then what she knew now, she would have shunned him with forked fingers, but swaddled in her blissful cocoon of childish ignorance, she had welcomed him with open arms, entranced by his smiling eyes and spicy, paternal smell, leather and expensive wool and the cold, metallic tang of Rolex watches. When Sam Braun came, it was Father Christmas and Peter Pan. He brought toys and patient smiles, and for a while, her mother, so often lost in her own melancholy world, would brighten into the vivacious woman Catherine had only glimpsed in dog-eared, yellowing photographs.

And he had brought with him the shining promise of Vegas lights. When Sam Braun had played Father Christmas in an Armani suit of charcoal grey, his sleigh had always been a stretch limousine as black as pitch. He had been glitz and glamour and the crisp, green scent of better than here, a prophet from the fabled land of milk and honey. She had idolized him, and she still remembered how wonderful it had felt to climb onto his lap and show him all her gilded ambitions.

_When I grow up, Uncle Sam, _lisped the Catherine Willows of a childhood long gone, _I want to be a showgirl. Can I work for you?_ All wide-eyed innocence and tremulous awe.

_Sure you can, Mugs. Sure you can._

His eyes had seemed so loving then, so warm, and she had reveled in the attention and the warmth of his hand on the crown of her small head. It was only in hindsight that she had understood the ugly truth, and by then, it had been far too late. The road she had traveled had been too long and too winding, and there had been no turning back. He had been a wolf in sheep's clothing; he had, in fact, spent the vast majority of his time clad in their sad sacrifices to the loom.

_My, what big teeth you have, Uncle Sam, _whispered Little Red Riding Catherine.

_The better to eat you with, my dear._

Well, he hadn't devoured her, but neither had he steered her away from her road to perdition. He could have told her what lay ahead, disabused her of the sugarplum fantasies. Behind the jolly façade, his wise, ruthless eyes had tended secrets and truths dangerous and deep, and he had lived in Vegas' underbelly and unsavory corners long enough to see past the polished veneer. He had known about the long, hot nights of swollen ankles that had awaited her, about the saltwater burn of cocaine residue in her nostrils and the low throb of fatigue in her hips and calves from the endless hours of bump and grind. He had known about the glare of the stage lights on bare shoulders and even barer breasts and the periodic catfights between dancers brought on by too many dances and too few customers. He had known all of this, and he had said nothing.

_He never forced you onto that stage. You went of your own volition, and for six years, it was a good living. Sometimes, it was a great living. Who knows how long you would have gone shaking the gifts your mother and Gregor Mendel gave you if you hadn't met Gil Grissom, that unlikely knight in shining armor? The truth was, you liked the attention. Not the ogling of men wearing beer goggles so thick that Jabba the Hutt would have garnered a twenty in his G-string on his turn around the pole, but the thoughtful, simmering gaze of men with just enough bourbon and scotch in their veins to send sultry, oak-aged heat into their bellies and twitching pricks. _

_The sway and serpentine slither of your hips was entrancing, a conduit to power about which you had always dreamed. You could make men pant like Pavlov's hounds, and you reveled in it because it was a skill not even Eddie, with his snide comments, casual dismissal of your aspirations, and constant reminders of the debt you owed him, could deny or take away._

Of course she had loved the attention and the heady thrill of knowing her marks were putty in her hands. Being pretty and sexy was the one thing at which she had excelled. She had never been Sara Sidle, with Harvard intellect and impish charm. She had done well in school, but her good grades had never merited any notice from her mother or her classmates. It had been her figure they had noticed, the seductive curve of hip and the haughty swell of breast. It hadn't taken her taken her long to figure out the lay of the land, and by her senior year in high school, she had developed a slinking strut that had turned heads.

For a few months after graduating high school, she had toyed with the idea of being a model and had even sent out a few head shots and hastily assembled picture portfolios, but nothing had ever come of it, and shortly after her nineteenth birthday, she had gone to Uncle Sam in the hope that he would make good on his promise to let her work for him. Uncle Sam-who would later prove to be Suspected Murderer Father Sam, oh my-had been as good as his word, and that same night, she had shimmied and shook to "Cat Scratch Fever".

Those hips had paid her way through college, and though girlhood fancy had curdled to hard reality after a week in a fleabag apartment with no air conditioning and leprous dry rot in the walls, she had kept on shaking until the day she found out that Lindsey was nestling in her belly. Why shouldn't she? Shaking her ass had made the world go round and paid the mortgage when Eddie was too high or drunk or busy screwing around to bother. It wasn't until she crossed paths with Gil Grissom that she'd realized she had a choice.

So, yes, she and voyeurism had been close companions for a long time, but now, standing in the threshold of Greg Sanders' small apartment with her silver field kit in her gloved hand, she felt shamed unease. The roles had been reversed, and the observed suddenly found herself in the role of observer, a voyeur goggling shamelessly at the private life of her coworker and friend. She hesitated for a moment in the doorway, sidled from foot to foot, took a deep breath to steady her jangling nerves, and went inside.

_Just keep your cool and gather the evidence, _said Gil Grissom inside her head. _You know how it's done because you've done it all before. It's just another case, Catherine. Don't let your emotions blind you._

She suppressed a snort. It was easy for him to say, he who seldom left the ascetic cloister of his apartment and preferred the company of cockroaches and corpses to other human beings. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him outside the lab, and even when he was working a case, he left the dirty business of interacting with victims' families or potential suspects to the rest of the team while he hid in his cluttered office and worked on forms and memos that he never seemed to finish. Fraternizing with members of the same species was a squalid task best left to others.

_That's why I never go out, _he had told her once, after she had nearly gone on a date with a man who turned out to be a murder suspect, and the smug superiority of it still stung. Tact was an art for which neither Grissom nor the science he worshipped had patience.

_Can you blame him after everything his eyes have seen over the years? After everything _yours _have seen? Every day, he's confronted with depravity and rage and the sickening consequences of vulnerability. He's scraped the brains of a young wife off the baking asphalt, only to find that a philandering husband in dire need of the insurance money put them there, and he's seen otherwise rational parents leave their infant son in the backseat of the car in the Vegas summer heat because they were certain he suffered from the same fatal, genetic defect that had claimed his older brother. Life is a cruel teacher, and it has taught him that to invite his fellow man into hearth and home is to invite tragedy._

_We all know that, _she thought fiercely as she took in the scene before her. _It's a lesson most of us learn in kindergarten when the girl we thought was our best friend forever steals our sacred graham cracker. We live and we learn, and when we get knocked down, we dust off our knees and get up again. A little warier, maybe, and hopefully a little wiser. Hell, I was with him on that baby case. I saw what those parents did, but I didn't stick my head in the sand. Nick got back in the game after being buried alive by a nut with an axe to grind. _

So Gil could cram his Zen wisdom as far as she was concerned.

_Because it's not just another case, is it, Mugs? _Sam Braun, quiet and musing and perversely paternal, and in her mind's eye, she saw him watching her from a table at the Monaco, chin propped on his upturned palm and a sardonic smile twitching on his lips. _Just like Nick wasn't. It's personal, and the cut runs deep. _

_Shut up, Sam, _she thought savagely, but he was right.

For all her claims to empathy for the victims and the families left behind, she could recall a sorry few of the faces she had seen and served in her capacity as CSI. Most were indistinct blurs, snatches of voice or hair color, one-dimensional cardboard cutouts defined by the tragedy that had befallen them. Those were the lucky ones. The rest were reduced to names and case numbers, consigned to irrelevancy the moment the lids were placed on their case files.

But this was Greg, and he was anything but one-dimensional. He was ebullient and precocious. He flirted-or had-with any woman with a pretty face and a nice pair of legs, and more than once during his DNA tech days, she had stumbled into the DNA lab to find him coyly purring sweet nothings into the phone and charming the girlfriend of the moment out of her socks.

_And probably her panties, too, _leered a glottal, gravelly voice that reminded her of Eddie, her late ex-husband. She rolled her eyes and pushed the unsettling notion of Greg the Panty Charmer away.

Greg was libidinous and often cheerfully ribald, but he was also as dependable and dogged as the rising and setting of the sun. He had never missed a shift, and on the many occasions Grissom or Ecklie had called him in to cover a shift or work extra hours, he had come without a murmur of protest, bouncing jauntily through the halls with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his lab coat and a grin on his face beneath the untidy profusion of spiked hair.

When Lindsey was small, Catherine had let Greg babysit once. Lindsey had been seven, and Catherine had been called to testify in a murder trial. Normally, Lindsey would have been in school, but the school had oh-so-thoughtfully scheduled a planning day, and so she had dropped off Lindsey at nine o'clock in the morning at Greg's apartment.

It had been his day off and probably his first chance in weeks to get a decent night's sleep, but Greg had met her at the door, wearing cutoff shorts and a Motorhead t-shirt and beaming as if he could think of no better way to spend his morning than playing Old Maid and Candyland and Chutes 'N" Ladders. And according to Lindsey, that was precisely what they had done, Greg sitting cross-legged on the floor and gleefully rolling the dice as he moved his piece around the candy-cane paradise.

_Remember when you came to pick her up that afternoon? Greg answered the door in an apron, carton of Chinese take-out in one hand. The mother in you cringed at the thought of all the MSG and salt coursing through your daughter's veins, but when you saw Lindsey with a pair of chopsticks and her face slathered with sweet and sour sauce, you couldn't find it in your heart to scold him. Dirty or not, she was happy, freed from the drudgery of school and the draconian restrictions of her usual diet, and Greg hid the bruised bags of exhaustion beneath his eyes with a brilliant, carefree grin._

_He was even decent enough to hide his skin mags, _the late, great Eddie commented wryly, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to smother a sudden desire to weep.

"Hey," said a voice at her shoulder, and she jumped.

"Oh! Christ, Jim, you-" She took a deep breath and blinked to ease the burning sensation in her eyes. "-No, I'm good. It's just…" She gestured helplessly at the shambles in the living room. "Dammit."

Brass grimaced and rubbed the nape of his neck with one dry-skinned palm. "Yeah, I know. Sorry I startled you." He was silent for a moment, studying the carpet. Then, "Where's Grissom?"

"He's coming," she said. "He wanted to be the one to tell Greg."

Brass' thin eyebrows shot toward his even thinner hairline. "Bet that's going well." Dour, and some would have said grossly inappropriate, but she knew that he was just doing his best to maintain his composure.

Her own composure was hardly assured. Each time she thought she had her emotions in check, her eyes would happen upon the blood pool over which Nick was crouching, and they would slip perilously in her grasping fingers, unwieldy and treacherous as wet glass. She was angry and sickened and filled with an iron-fingered, maternal instinct that surprised and unnerved her. She exhaled through her nose and crouched in the doorway to assess the scene.

_You've felt the protective, maternal instinct before, _the Eddie-voice mused, and there was no lascivious leer now, only quiet, gin-soaked sincerity and weary tenderness. _When they took Nick, your heart bled, and the idea of finding the person responsible and peeling the flesh from his bones was fire in your bones. If I didn't know better, Cath, I'd say it turned you on. When you found that feed wire sticking out of the ground at the plant nursery, I've never seen you dig so furiously in my life. You'd have dug him up all by yourself if it had come to it._

_Of course I would've. He was mine. And so is Greg. _She set her kit down on the concrete just outside the door, careful not to disturb the flower petals strewn over the threshold.

_They're family. More than I ever was. Your pal, Grissom, has gone to the wall and buried more bodies for you than you had any right to hope, and when I was too drunk and too stoned and you were too broke, he and your lab cronies always found a way to throw a birthday party for Lindsey, even if all they ever gave her were those stupid science kits and ant farms that she never opened and that gather dust in the back of her closet._

A wistful smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. "What's the story with these?" She nodded at the rose petals at her feet.

Brass, who had been watching Nick photograph the blood pool in woebegone silence, trudged over. "Not sure. They were here when I arrived. You should know I stepped in them on my initial entry."

"You've got to be kidding me."

"Hey, I had no idea it was a crime scene," he snapped. "Greg asked me to check on his better half, so I did. I wasn't case-hunting. At worst, I thought she'd be dead asleep with the phone off the hook or playing Show Me Your DNA with the neighbor across the breezeway."

_She might be plain dead,_ retorted a cynical, savage voice inside her head, and she pressed her lips together against a scream of frustration. For a veteran cop like Jim Brass to make such a rookie mistake…

"Is there anything else I should know?" The question was harsher than she had intended, and she grimaced. Emotions were running hot on all sides, and the last thing they needed-the last thing Greg needed-was for the team to get bogged down in pointless, internecine squabbling while the seconds ticked by and hope and opportunity slipped out of reach.

_Not exactly one to cast stones, are you, Mugs? _Sam Braun said, and she saw Gil's face, somnolent and pinched as she confessed the sin of the cashed check that had transformed Lindsey from public school latch-key kid to private prep school snot.

_What else should I know, Catherine?_

"Are we pointing fingers now?" Brass was snarling. "Because I seem to remember a few spectacular mishaps from your storied career. Like blowing up the DNA lab with Sanders in it. Rumor has it that he still has souvenirs from that little gift that keeps on giving."

The conciliatory attitude vanished in a white-hot flare of indignation and hurt. Ecklie had never forgiven her for her accidental incineration of several million dollars' worth of equipment, and she had never forgiven herself for the injuries her moment of carelessness had caused Greg. Greg assured her that there were neither hard feelings nor sleepless nights on his part, but sometimes, she would catch his gaze in the break room, there and gone before emotion could register, and she would wonder.

"I just thought that as an experienced cop and a former head of CSI, you'd know better than to blunder through my evidence like a nervous rookie," she retorted. "Forgive me for giving you a little credit."

"Hey!" Sharp and quick as the report of a pistol.

Nick was still crouching over the pool of blood with the camera in his gloved hand, but he was no longer studying it. He was staring at her and Brass in incredulous irritation. His jaw twitched ominously, and beneath the bill of his cap, his face was colorless.

"If you guys want to play the blame game, that's fine by me, but could you wait until we've finished processing the scene?" He set the camera beside his kit and reached for the packet of swabs in the foremost slot. "I'm sure Greg would appreciate it." He shook his head and turned to the blood pool again.

She opened her mouth to reply, but there was nothing she could say. As the senior CSI on the scene, she should have known better than to engage in a sparring contest with a colleague. Grissom certainly wouldn't have gotten so easily sidetracked, and her intended defense of bad memories and a nauseating sense of déjà vu wouldn't carry much weight with a man who'd spent the better part of ten hours in a Plexiglass coffin wired with explosives.

She offered Brass a bleak smile. "Truce?"

Brass ran a hand through his close-cropped, thinning hair. "Yeah. Yeah," he murmured vaguely, and sighed.

"This is going to be an explosive any way you slice it, so is there anything else you touched? When we get this son of a bitch, I want to make sure it sticks."

Brass blinked at her in logy incomprehension for a moment, and then his face cleared. "I turned on the light when I made entry. It was dark, and after I stepped in the flowers, I decided to play it safe." He shrugged apologetically. "Not one of my finer professional moments, I guess. Oh, and I opened the closet door while I was clearing the apartment and hoping against hope that Mrs. Sanders was present and accounted for. Anyway, I'm gonna head outside and make sure the lookie-lous aren't getting too close."

"We have lookie-lous?" she said, surprised. The only people at the scene when she'd arrived had been uniforms from LVPD.

"Not yet," he answered grimly, "but we will. The lights always attract them." He turned to go. "I'll start knocking on doors, see if anyone saw or heard anything. They were probably all in the shower." With that, he trudged out, notebook clutched in stubby fingers.

When he was gone, she examined the petals at her feet. Most of them were clustered at the threshold in red, bruised clumps. Here and there was a green flash of stem or a brown sliver of thorn. A few petals had strayed from the nucleus of the carnage and lay on the carpet in small, red smears, each a body unto itself. They led to the table where Nick crouched, shining his Maglite over the carpet in search of stray fibers, particulate matter, or blood spatter. A single petal lay beside the table leg, and another was caught beneath the rubber-stopped tip of a crutch that listed dangerously against the table's edge.

"Hey, Nick?"

"Mm?" Nick had dropped to all fours and was scouring the carpet beneath the table.

"Did you see a vase in here?"

Nick spoke without looking up. "Nope. I did find shards of glass, but they were unglazed and transparent, and there was a wet spot consistent with water or spilled liquid of some sort. I collected it and a swab of the carpet for Trace, but I'm guessing a drinking glass got broken in the struggle."

"So, the flowers were delivered, then?"

Nick swept the beam of his flashlight over a pencil beneath the table." Could be," he conceded, but isn't it a bit late to be delivering flowers? Are there florists open at this time of night?"

"Honey, this is Vegas. Everything is open all night. Besides, the twenty-four-hour wedding chapels have to get their flowers from somewhere."

"True." Nick's beam paused on the pencil, and he reached for an evidence bag. "Hm."

"You found something?" she asked, instantly alert.

"Maybe." He pinched the eraser end of the pencil between his thumb and forefinger and rotated it in the brilliant beam of his flashlight. "There are pencils and pens all over the place. Another casualty of the struggle, most likely. Every one of them is still intact. But not this one. It's broken nearly in half, and the tip is missing. Blood on the splintered head, too."

"Good find, Nicky."

He grunted. "We won't know that until we get it back to the lab." He slipped the pencil into a plastic evidence baggie, sealed it, and put it into his kit. "You're thinking whoever did this used the flowers as a ploy to get inside the apartment?"

"It's certainly possible. It's cheap and has a surprisingly high success rate. Otherwise intelligent women who wouldn't let the President through the front door will throw wide the gates at the barest whiff of romance."

"If the flowers came from a flower shop, where's the box? The plastic wrapper to keep the thorns from tearing up your hands?" Nick was on his knees, hands pressed to his thighs as he surveyed the room.

"Good question."

She shone the beam of her Maglite around the room in a slow, sweeping arc until it alit on a thin strip of transparent sheeting that lay on the carpet behind the overturned chair, sides curled and dappled with beads of moisture. She gingerly stepped over the pile of flower petals she had been examining and pinched the find between her thumb and forefinger with practiced care.

"I think I found the wrapping," she announced, and held it up.

Nick nodded. "Okay. That means the card should be here someplace unless our guy's not that thorough." His own beam joined the search.

Silence fell as they lost themselves to the work, soothing and familiar in spite of the personal nature of the case. Even as she sought the neat, white square that heralded proclamations of undying love or at least a coy invitation to get horizontal, Catherine found herself taking in the broader details of Greg's apartment. She had never visited again after Greg's adventures in babysitting, and had duty not compelled her to do so, she probably never would have. Greg was sharp and funny and sweetly shy beneath his eccentric façade, but he was young, and while she might once have shaken her ass to the grinding, raunchy chords of "Girls, Girls, Girls while coke burned in her nose with the promise of seeing the dawn, she was never going to develop a taste for The Dead Kennedys or _Gran Turismo 3._

The apartment was cramped and untidy, and despite the incontrovertible proof of matrimony, there was precious little sign of female habitation. The living room blinds were coated in a thin layer of dust, as was the squat, black bulk of the PS2 perched atop the flat-screen television on the far wall. There were no curios or knick-knacks scattered on window ledges or teetering precariously from the topmost bookshelf. There was, however, a pile of _Sports Illustrated _swimsuit editions stacked haphazardly on the coffee table, and a wrinkled t-shirt lay over the back of the couch like shed skin.

"Mrs. Sanders has no love for Martha Stewart," she murmured to no one in particular.

_Voyeur, _hissed the voice of accusation again. _You're prying into the life of a man who calls you friend even after your lab mishap. You have no right to stand in his living room and inventory the mundane secrets of his life and critique his wife's housekeeping skills as if you were some kind of domestic diva. It wasn't so long ago that you were living from hand to mouth and sleeping on your mother's couch with Lindsey tucked into the crook of your arm because Eddie was froggy and loud and too ready with his fists._

She thought of Lindsey then, three years old and playing on the threadbare floor of the apartment she paid for, chattering in her tiny, singsong voice and oblivious to the tatty dress and the dull, matted hair of her dolls, unaware that her mother had found them in the Goodwill donation box and wheedled the asking price to a dollar because the dollar-fifty was fifty cents beyond her reach. If anyone had seen Lindsey then, in her too-small dresses and with wide blue eyes that saw too much and often bore the telltale dark smudges of a sleepless night spent in a cheap motel, they would have taken her for a neglected child and shaken their heads and clucked in disapproval.

_Those people can all go to hell, _she thought savagely. _I love Lindsey, and she might not've played with designer toys, but I made sure she knew she was the best little girl in the world every damn night, and I'd kill any son of a bitch that threatened her. She was rich where it counted._

_And Greg loves Grace, sloppy housekeeping or not._

Touche, she mouthed soundlessly, ashamed.

"Yeah, the place hasn't changed much since the last time I was here," Nick conceded with a thin-lipped smile and a faint bob of his head.

"You've been here before?" she asked, pulled from her reverie.

"Me and Warrick, both." His voice was tinged with amusement. "We'd come to watch a ballgame every couple of months. It wasn't like we were having candlelit dinners."

She considered that. "So, what can you tell me about those?" She gestured to the crutches with the beam of her flashlight.

Nick's smile faded, and he shook his head.

_I don't know, or I'm not telling?_ she wondered.

"Forearm crutches," said a voice from the doorway, and Grissom swept into the room with field kit in hand. He stepped nimbly over evidence as though guided by unseen hands, and behind the spotless lenses of his glasses, his eyes were scanning the scattered and strewn contents of the room.

"You knew?"

"I had to sign off on his change of insurance form." He shrugged and crouched on his haunches beside her. He set his kit down and opened the latches with a sharp _click._

"And?"

Grissom turned his unsettling gaze on her. "And what?" he said mildly. "Grace Sanders has ataxic Cerebral Palsy." He pulled on a pair of gloves.

"And that is?" she prodded.

His offered her an enigmatic half-smile. "Where are Warrick and Sara?"

_Grissom-speak for _none of your damn business, she thought irritably. "In the bedroom, looking for evidence of a secondary crime scene."

"Good. Anything so far?" He was busily inspecting the rubber tip of the fallen crutch.

"As far as a secondary crime scene? No, but we think whoever took her used these flowers as a ruse to gain access to the apartment."

Grissom merely tapped his chin with the forefinger of his right hand.

"Did you…break the news to Greg?" she asked when the silence had stretched too long between them, hot and sticky as saltwater taffy.

"Yes." Flat, mechanical.

"How did he take it?"

That gaze again, smooth and inscrutable as black glass, and though she had passed adolescence long ago, she fought the urge to squirm and stammer like a schoolgirl who had shown herself for a fool in front of her teacher. Her scalp prickled with unexpected heat.

"Touche," she murmured and bent to her work, and she was glad when the fall of her hair obscured her face.


	5. How the Other Half Lives

Disclaimer: All recognizable people, places, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer, Anthony Zuiker, and CBS. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders is my creation.

Jim Brass had never realized how small Greg Sanders was. What the DNA tech cum CSI lacked in bulk, he had more than made up for in exuberance and tireless energy, but now, hunched in the corner of the break room with his head on his knees, the façade was gone. He looked impossibly fragile, a child in adults' clothing, and huddled between the wall and the couch, he resembled nothing so much as a child hiding from the bogeyman.

_That's because he is, _Brass thought grimly. _I'm just the friendly neighborhood policeman until the blood hits the pavement, and then I'm the jackal, sniffing the air for the telltale traces of motive and alibi and bodies buried beneath the floorboards. Oh, what a shiny badge I have, the better to steal your secrets, little boy._

_That sounds more like lycanthropy, _mused a peculiarly Grissom voice inside his head. _Medieval Europeans believed that those who made a pact with the Devil were cursed to assume the form of a wolf during the full moon. Freud posited that lycanthropy was a manifestation of man's basest tendencies, and modern medicine recognizes it as a legitimate psychiatric disorder._

_Fascinating, _he thought dourly, and raised his hand to sip from a non-existent coffee cup. He blinked as he caught sight of his empty hand, and let it drop to his side.

In truth, he was at a loss. He knew what he _should _do; he should go into the room with his trusty notebook and begin the ginger task of peeling away the layers of Greg's life. But what he should do wasn't within a thousand miles of what he _wanted _to do or what he thought he _could _do. If he had his druthers, he would walk away and pretend none of this was happening.

_You can't do that, Jim._

No, that was the bitch of it. He couldn't.

_Bogeyman or werewolf, here I come. _He squared his shoulders, tugged ineffectually at his tie, and strode into the room.

"Greg." It was cautious, unobtrusive, and yet it still sounded to his ears as though he had spat it out like a lump of gristle. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Greg."

The figure in the corner did not move. Greg's forehead remained on the rounded peaks of his knees, one hand clasped loosely over the wrist of the other. As the seconds ticked inexorably by, Brass found himself studying the toes of Greg's shoes. They were leather loafers, so unlike the creased Keds and Converse that had once adorned his feet, and perversely incongruous with his perpetually tousled hair.

_He's dead, _Brass thought with morbid certainty. _He couldn't bear the idea of _'til death do us part _coming so soon, so he gave up the ghost. I'll pick up his head, and the eyes that meet mine will be glazed and inhuman as a taxidermist's marbles. Oh, won't that be fun, breaking the news to Grissom?_

_Don't be stupid, _snapped the voice of common sense. _He doesn't even know she's dead. Nobody does. Right now, all you have is a blood puddle inside a trashed apartment and a missing wife._

All of that was patently true, but he could not shake the conviction that he was staring at the shoes of a corpse.

_He could know she was dead. _Sly, insistent. _If he killed her._

That was a possibility he was unwilling to consider, and he shook his head with a grimace of self-reproach. Greg could no more have killed his wife than he-Brass-could have been voted Mr. Vegas.

_How many suspects have you interviewed over the storied span of your illustrious career? Thousands at least. And of those thousands, how many wandered the streets of Vegas with a neon sign proclaiming their guilt? Sure, you've seen bad seeds, lowlife thugs destined for the cellblock since they were playing with blocks at kindergarten recess, but most of the asses that have occupied the seat opposite you in an interrogation room had no prior record. They were just average Joes, schlepping through the same miserable existence as the rest of us, and then one day, an argument over the xeriscaping or the credit card bill ended with them bashing their wives' brains out with an oh-so-dependable Craftsman hammer and stashing her in the hot water heater._

He reached out to shake Greg's shoulder. "Gr-,"

"I heard you. I just didn't want to." Gravelly and strained, as though he had spent a great deal of time screaming. Maybe he had.

He could hardly quibble with the sentiment. "Ah, yeah. Yeah, I guess I can understand that." He sidled from foot to foot and ran his fingers through the scant remains of his hair.

"Can you?" he croaked from between his knees.

He had no answer for that, and so he said, "Listen, I know this is a bad time, but I have to ask you a few questions." _Beam me up, Scotty. Anywhere but here._

"Of course you do." It was dry and hollow. "Like was it Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick?" He gave a hoarse caw of mirthless laughter and raised his head.

"Oh, Greg."

He hadn't meant to say it, but Greg's appearance had startled the exclamation from him. Gone was the radiant light of good-natured devilry that had always gleamed in his eyes, and in its stead was the haunted, lifeless emptiness of a razed landscape. His eyes were bloodshot and pouched in pallid hollows. His cheeks were chafed from constant rubbing and bore the unmistakable imprint of his knees. Gazing into Greg's lost, grief-stricken face, Brass put paid to any doubts about his innocence.

"I don't suppose you've found my wife breaking the bank at the Bellagio with what was supposed to be my retirement fund?" he asked.

"Unfortunately not. I wish to God I had."

_That's hardly proper questioning protocol. Ecklie would have your balls in a jar if he heard you._

Yes, well, protocol could fuck itself for all he cared, and so could Ecklie, for that matter. It was probably a cherished pastime of their erstwhile Director.

"Listen, before we get started, you want a drink? Water?"

"If you want my DNA, all you have to do is ask." Greg scrubbed his face with his hands.

Brass blinked. "What? No, no, that's-Jesus." He gave a reedy, humorless chuckle and pinced his chin between the web of his thumb. "I just wondered if you were thirsty, is all. If you want, I think I can find the bottle of scotch I keep in my desk. Strictly for medicinal purposes, of course."

A soft snort. "No, thanks. Every time I hit the hard stuff, I wake up in a puddle of my own vomit with my pants on my head and Chewbecca the next pillow over. At least, I did. Grace says I-,"

He stopped abruptly. His mouth worked, and his Adam's apple bobbed convulsively in his throat.

"This is not happening, you know. It's not." It was strangled. "It can't be. When I left, she was at her laptop, banging away at an editing job that was due in the morning. She was always like that, always skating as close to the deadline as she could without going over. It was an adrenaline rush."

"Extreme editing," Brass quipped wryly, and was instantly mortified with himself.

To his surprise, Greg laughed, a hysterical, shrill titter, discordant as unsteady fingers over yellowing piano keys. "Yeah. Yeah, you could say that, I guess. Everybody needs their kicks."

Brass flipped open his notebook and sat on the couch, secretly grateful that he no longer had to look into Greg's bewildered face and ashamed of his gratitude. His knees and ankles crackled and creaked as he shifted on the lumpy cushion, and he winced. The ravages of time grew more strident with every passing year, and it wouldn't be long until the antiseptic, lemongrass aroma of Ben Gay wafted in his wake the way English Leather did now.

_That's the booby prize of this job, Jim, ole buddy, _said a dolorous voice inside his head. _When you were a kid, you thought being a cop was all about catching the bad guys and reveling in the thanks of an adoring public, and it is, but it takes more than it gives. It ages men before them time, turns supple skin to leather and introduces tongues to the chalky balm of antacid. It strips time from the years of your life._

_You lost a year the first time you saw the body of a dead hooker fished out of Lake Meade as a rookie. She was blue and bloated, and you've never forgotten the smell-river silt and sewage and decaying flesh. There were gelatinous strands hanging from her body, and at first, you wondered just how seaweed had found its way onto the body, and then you realized it wasn't seaweed, but skin. That kept you up for a week back then. Now it wouldn't even be a blip on the radar._

_You lost ten years when you were treated to the sight of a two-week-old infant floating in a toilet bowl in a tenement out on Logan Road. The mother was a junkie, and after two weeks of screaming and dirty diapers, she decided that the kid was a crimp in her style and a drain on her smack fund, so she did what any respectable dirtbag would do and flushed her cares away. Or tried to, anyway._

_You know what the real bitch of it is, though? It doesn't just steal time from you; it takes it from everyone around you. Your wife was radiant as a spring rose the day you married her, but it didn't take long for the shadow to fall across her face like the premature coming of winter, for the grooves of constant worry to etch themselves into the corners of her mouth and around her eyes and dust her temples with strands of grey._

_And then there was Ellie. One minute, she was a grinning toddler wobbling across the living room with part of a cracker clutched in her chubby fist and the rest smeared over her chin like greasepaint, and the next, she was sixteen going on forty, jaded and defiant and far too old for her years. _

_It's happening to Greg, too. It happens to all of you eventually. When he was a tech, he was twenty-seven going on twelve, and those who didn't know him would have sworn he was twenty. He laughed like there would always be another reason to party, and he drove Grissom to distraction by shoving markers up his nose or wearing a showgirl's headdress and sashaying down the hallway. _

_But not anymore. Oh, he still laughs, but not so readily, and when he does, it is no longer so pure. It's been contaminated by knowledge that he can never unlearn. And Grissom has succeeded in inculcating him with the Value of Evidence, so gone are the days of footloose and fancy free. He's twenty-seven and looks it, and by the time this is all over, he might very well look fifty._

Brass couldn't argue with any of it, and so he clicked his ballpoint pen, licked his lips and said, "You said Grace liked to push the deadlines of her projects. She ever push it too hard, miscalculate and miss the deadline?"

An emphatic shake of the head. "No. Absolutely not. Miss a deadline, and you lose business, and Grace had trouble drumming up business. Not because she was sloppy, but because-," He spread his palms and gave a one-shouldered shrug.

"The crutches?"

"For some people, yeah," he answered diffidently, and Brass thought he detected a note of irritation. "They thought that because her legs weren't exactly top of the line, the rest of her must be Taiwan spare part, too. The clients she did have loved her, and she got lots of repeat business and word-of mouth-referrals.

"How many clients did she have?"

"I'm not sure. A few dozen that I know of."

"You think you could come up with a list?"

"I'm sure she kept a record on her laptop, which has no doubt been taken into evidence." He had tried to sound glib, but beneath the thin scrim of detachment was an aching confusion that prompted Brass to study the fascinating grain of the paper in his notebook.

"I'm sure Grissom took care of it," he said lamely. "So, no pissed-off clientele?"

"Not that I know of."

"When was the last time you saw Grace?"

"Eight forty-five. I leave the same time every night. I scarfed a BLT at the counter, kissed her goodbye, and told her to order chicken tandori from the curry place a couple blocks over for when I came home."

"Nothing seemed unusual then? She seem nervous, say anything about going out?"

"No. No, dammit. Everything was-," He slapped his palm against the floor with a meaty thwap. "Everything was like it always was. If I had thought for one second that something was wrong, I would never have left her there alone." It was furious and plaintive. "Grace is tough, but sometimes, she's too stubborn for her own good."

"How do you mean?" Brass tapped the nib of his pen against the paper of his notebook.

"She's so bent on proving that disabled doesn't mean dead that she pushes herself hard. Too hard. She'd climb Everest on a pogo stick if she thought she could get away with it. Half the time, I've got to carry her to bed at night because she's too tired to keep her balance. Fights me, too. Think I've got scars somewhere. You wanna see?" He fumbled listlessly with his shirtsleeve.

Brass held up his hand. "No, that's all right, Greg. I'll take your word for it."

Greg was rambling, but Brass couldn't blame him. In the space of hours, his life had upended. Frankly, he was coping better than many people did; they were several hours into the investigation, and he had yet to throw a chair across the room, assault the investigating officers, or suffer a complete mental breakdown and sever his carotid with a ballpoint pen in the men's room, all of which he had seen over the years.

Besides, his own mind was hopelessly distracted by the image of Doc Robbins stumping up the cragged slopes of Mount Everest on his titanium legs, silver beard frosted with snow and crutch slipping and sliding over the frozen ground. The good doctor was inexplicably wearing Bermuda shorts, and they flapped gaily in the shearing arctic winds.

_Jesus, Jim, get a grip. _"Do you usually call to check in on her?" he murmured, still dazed by the Felliniesque scenario dancing in his head.

"Every night. She hates it, but it makes me feel better."

"Mm."

"Never in the field, though. Grissom would kill me." A brittle laugh, rice paper clutched too tightly between bruising, clumsy fingers.

"No set time, then."

"Not really. Greg ran his fingers through his hair and sat forward. "You know what I don't get, though," he said earnestly, and fixed him with a bloodshot gaze.

_Ah, here we go. That little phrase usually precedes a clue, my dear Watson. _Brass straightened on the couch and stilled the tapping of his pen. "What's that, Greg?"

"Why didn't Rufus answer the phone? He should have been there by the time I called."

The vision of Doc Robbins, Bermuda-shorted Sherpa-in-training, vanished in a rush of adrenaline. "Rufus?" he asked sharply.

"Rufus Goodman, her attendant. He comes every night and stays until I get home."

"How long has Mr. Goodman worked for you?" His pen was flying now."

"He works for Grace," Greg corrected him dully. "Has since the day she was born. Well, technically, I guess he worked for her parents first. I mean, infants don't employ aides."

"Anything out of the ordinary about him? Bad temper? Drinking problem?"

"Nope. Rufus and I don't exactly bond over beer and salsa, but the few times we've spoken, he was pretty laid-back."

"This guy spends untold hours a week with your wife, and you never check him out?" Brass asked incredulously.

"I didn't see a need," Greg snapped. "Grace vouched for him, and that was good enough for me. She's disabled, not stupid."

"Whoa, hey, Greg." Brass dropped his pen and raised his palms in a conciliatory gesture. "I didn't mean to insult Grace's intelligence. I'm just trying to pick up the trail." He sighed and scrubbed his nape with his palm. "I'm gonna grab a cup of coffee. You want one?" He rose from the couch.

He had no desire for coffee. In fact, caffeine was the last thing his jangling nerves needed, but he had to move, had to retreat in the face of Greg's raw, flailing misery. Even without direct eye contact, it was cloying and abrasive, alcohol and ether in an open wound. It was a palpable miasma that made his notebook sticky and heavy in his fingers.

"You'll have to make a fresh pot. The sludge that's in there now looks like a refugee from the Pleistocene era. A Brontosaurus could step in it and never be seen again."

"There's a surprise," he muttered as he shuffled toward the coffee pot and the open bag of coffee on the counter."

"I tried to brew a pot earlier, but…,"

That explained the open coffee, then. "I got it. Don't worry."

He was halfway to the coffee pot when Greg said, "I know you didn't mean anything. I'm sorry for losing it, but it's just-," His back was to Greg, and he felt rather than saw or heard the stirring of his hand through the air as he groped for the words to define the inexpressible.

It was funny, that. Since the news of Grace's disappearance, no one could seem to finish their sentences. They all fumbled and sputtered and tripped over their reluctant tongues. Even Grissom and Ecklie, brothers in loquacity, had fallen prey to the odd aphasia that had gripped them each in turn like the constricting fingers of a mischievous god. He had never counted himself as a Rhodes scholar, but his wit had never so thoroughly abandoned him.

_Pretty soon, we'll lose the capacity for speech altogether, _he thought morbidly. _We'll just grunt and hoot and scratch, and by the time Ecklie bows to the inevitable and calls the FBI, even that might be gone. Culpepper and his goons will arrive and find us all stricken dumb, much to their delight. Culpepper will have Grissom hermetically sealed in a glass box and display him in his office, and at Christmas, they'll decorate him with tinsel. _

He peered into the coffee pot and recoiled. "Are you sure this isn't one of Grissom's prized experiments?"

"I told you it was nasty."

He wrinkled his nose at the acrid stink emanating from the coffee pot and turned on the tap. Routine, soothing, and a welcome distraction from the questions he was about to ask. "Now comes the hard part, Greg."

There was a sharp intake of breath from behind him, as if an unseen intruder had dealt Greg a swift blow to the solar plexus, but that was all.

_He's bracing himself. He knows how this works, this sordid rifling through the secret compartments of life that no other human being should have the right to peruse. I'm so sorry, Greg, _he thought bleakly, and said, "Is there any possibility that she just decided to cut her los-leave?" Never before had the measuring lines on the side of the coffee pot held such fascination for him.

Until that moment, Greg had always entertained the notion that preliminary questioning was a necessary imposition that could be borne gracefully, but sitting in the break room, shielded from the staggering brunt of the loss he now faced by the wall and the dingy upholstery of the couch, he knew it was not so, and the enormity of his naivete made him want to laugh and weep all at once.

Brass was treading as lightly as he dared for the sake of friendship, and still the question burned in the pores of his skin and the hard notch of his breastbone, a dagger he could not dislodge and that burrowed deeper with every shallow breath. It was graceless and impudent and galling, made all the worse because he understood the question beneath the polite façade.

_Was she fucking around, Greggo? Hey, is there any possibility that while you were performing a valued civil service for Clark County and the grateful state of Nevada, your wife was swapping epithelials and biological contributions with the mailman or the cable guy or a man she met over the Internet when she was supposed to be editing a thesis for a bigshot professor at UNLV? These things happen all the time, you know. How many times have you seen it for yourself?_

More than he could count, and that was excluding his years as a DNA tech, when all his case knowledge had come from idle, second-hand gossip of field CSIs and the swabs and blood vials they brought him. Nearly all of his cases in his first year as a CSI had involved adultery or some permutation thereof. Women scorned and jilted paramours had paraded through his line of sight and his interrogation room in a never-ending stream, all with fury and twisted grief in their hearts and venom on their lips.

_And what do their friends and luckier lovers all say when confronted with the sordid truth about those they claimed to know best? _But that can't be. They were so happy. He would never hurt her. She adored him. _It's a song as old as rhyme, as the old Disney song goes, and they cling to it with the tenacity of the desperate, no matter how strongly the evidence points to the contrary._

_Maybe she did run. Maybe she packed her bags and left you and your bachelor pad cum love nest behind. Ten hours is a long time to be shut up in that apartment night after night with nothing but the TV and the mind-numbing glow of infomercials with which to while away the time until you return and whisk her away to bed._

_She wasn't alone, _he countered. _She had Rufus, and besides, she knew I'd be home._

_Yes, she had Rufus. She's had him since the day the world had her, and I'm sure she loves him dearly, but being alone and being lonely are two very different things, or have you forgotten being in fourth grade and miles and light years ahead of your classmates? While they struggled with the multiplication tables and the geometric bedlam of solar system model kits, you were fiddling with junior chemistry sets in your parents' garage and melting the tires of the family car to the concrete floor. You were outgoing and you liked Transformers and Thundercats as much as the kid at the desk next to you, but you were also smart, and that relegated you to the caste of nerds and geeks and earned you the title of Poindexter. _

_It was the same in high school and college. You breezed through classes with the greatest of ease, but in the cafeteria or in the parking lot behind the school, it was a different world altogether. You were unobtrusive enough to avoid the notice of the jocks and future dropouts, but the same camouflage that spared you beatings also meant that the girls paid you little mind, either. You were Greg, the nice guy, the one to whom they could confess their secret crushes, but to whom they never gave the time of day unless they needed help with their science project, and then it was all swaying hips and batting eyelashes until the grades came in._

_It was the same in college. You were the fun guy, the cool guy, but no matter how hard you flirted-no matter how much pot you smoked or how extensive your knowledge of pop culture, you were never good enough. If you were lucky, they tossed you a sloppy, indifferent kiss that tasted of lipstick and beer or permitted you a fleeting feel of a breast beneath a rumpled t-shirt. It wasn't until your senior year that you lost your virginity on a lumpy mattress in a frat house bedroom, and you barely remember it aside from warmth and wetness and a spasming heat that stole your breath and left you drained and boneless when it was over._

_So you ought to know full well the difference between alone and lonely, because unlike Grissom, who reveres his solitude, you spent a great deal of time in a crowded room and wishing that just for once, you could join the bubbling, dizzying gestalt of adolescent life around you. _

He did know, and he was heartily glad to be shut of those years. He had friends now, and he had Grace, who hadn't cared that he was a nice guy. In fact, she loved him because he _was_ a nice guy, and she made no secret of the fact. She delighted in his quirky sense of humor and his occasional lapses into true brilliance, and she had let him in more deeply than anyone else. She was sweet, and she was fierce, and when she took him to bed, she meant it.

And she would never, ever have left him alone. She had promised him so in front of a California justice of the peace and a thousand times after, and she was a woman of her word. Even if she had decided to leave him, she would have told him to his face, not crept out under cover of night with her tail between her tottering legs. Gracie would have gone out with a bang.

_No, _he thought fiercely. _She didn't leave me of her own free will. Somebody _stole _her from me, and if I know her, she fought every step of the way. Gracie never believed in going quietly into that good night. See, Gracie? I'm not just a science guy, after all. How about that literary reference for you, babe?_

_But-, _began the pernicious voice.

_No! No buts. I know Grace, and the blood on the floor tells me all I need to know._

He fought the urge to titter even as his throat constricted with the threat of tears. A few hours ago, the blood pool on the floor had represented the sum of all fears, and now it was his totem against the notion of abandonment. Irony, thy name is Greg Sanders.

"Greg?" Brass prompted, and he jumped.

He shook his head. "No," he heard himself say. "No. She wouldn't just leave. Everything is fine between us; if it wasn't, she would have told me. She's not timid."

"Are you sure?"

He suppressed a twinge of irritation. "Grace Elizabeth Sanders is the only thing in my life of which I am absolutely sure."

"Is-,"

"Were there signs of a struggle?" he asked abruptly.

Brass paused in the act of spooning coffee grounds into the percolator. "She put up one hell of a fight." He dropped the spoonful into the percolator without looking up.

"Good," he said savagely. Good girl, Graci-," He splayed his fingers in front of his face and curled them into a loose fist. He would not use that private term of endearment, not here. It was still his, and his alone.

He waited for Brass to resume his questioning, but the only sound was his own ragged breathing. Brass was placing the coffee carafe beneath the dispenser with the reverent solemnity of an acolyte bearing an icon to the altar of his god and fixedly not looking at him. The detective cleared his throat, a phlegmatic rattle, but that was all.

_He's waiting for me to crack, _he thought with feverish clarity. _Waiting for me to crumble beneath the pressure and start screaming or crying or both. He doesn't want to watch me fall apart._

He was light and fragile inside his skin, and with every breath, he was sure he was going to come untethered from the world and drift away, borne on the thin Vegas wind until he touched the cold fire of the stars, but he could summon neither years nor hysteria. There was only an airless emptiness, a sense of fumbling blindly within himself. He lifted his finger to scratch his nose and was unsurprised to find that it was weightless as paper on the end of his hand.

_I'm the Rocket Man, _he thought nonsensically. _And what a long, strange trip it's been and going to be._

Brass flipped the switch on the percolator with dreamy slowness. Finally, "Is there any chance you were having an affair and your other significant other decided to eliminate the competition?" Quiet, painfully embarrassed.

The question should have angered him, but he could only manage an exhausted incredulity, and he uttered a sharp bark of laughter. The idea of cheating on Grace was ludicrous to him. Oh, he still enjoyed the scenery and the seductive sashay of passing ladies on the street, and Grace had often spoken of fitting him with blinders and goggles to keep his eyes in their sockets, but that was as far as it ever went, and she knew it. Hers were the last pair of epithelial undergarments he ever intended to wear.

"No. That would require another significant other and more Viagra than Hugh Hefner could stockpile."

"Ah." Brass turned his pen in his palm. "Okay. Hey, coffee should be ready soon."

Greg said nothing. He was mesmerized by the red glow of the percolator's ON switch.

_Like Grace's hair. Not the same shade, no, but the same vitality, simmering and vibrant and searing if you touched it for too long. I took her out to Lake Meade once for wine and necking and lazy canoeing, and after a day of lazing on the water and drinking beers on the shore with our toes it in water, we got ready to leave, and her hair was fierce autumn fire in what was left of the daylight. I had to touch it, run my fingers from crown to tip. It was windblown and damp and soft as silk, and I curled it around my fingers, buried my nose in her hair and breathed as deeply as I could. Grace thought I was crazy, but she let me do it anyway._

_That wasn't all you touched, either. You were touching a lot more by the time dark drew down and the Vegas blacktop hid you from prying eyes. You pulled the car off into the desert and steamed up the windows with breaths and urgency and whispers in the dark. The desert was so quiet, and you and the damned shocks were so loud, and near the end, you were convinced that a passing highway patrol car would hear the noise and come to investigate, and oh, wouldn't that be fun, explaining to Grissom how you got caught with your bare ass in the breeze and your wife's dainty ankle draped over the steering wheel? But then Grace found you with her small hands that never stop trembling but always know what you need, and you no longer cared about the Nevada Highway Patrol or anything else, even after her twitching foot found the horn and announced to anyone within a five-mile radius that lo, it was good._

Silk and satin and the bony jut of fragile hipbones beneath his hands. Sweat and salt and the squeaking puff of Grace's breath as coherent thought was swamped beneath the surge of lust and his hips and his name dissolved into mindless noise. He remembered the smell of vinyl and Armor-All and sex and the feel of unsticking his knee from the seat when it was over.

And oh, God, why wouldn't Brass shut up? He was talking again, asking his questions that scoured him raw, and Grace and the desert were slipping away. He clung to the memory, reluctant to leave it and return to a present that smelled of scorched coffee and drywall and sweat. The desert was sweeter, with Grace and her crown of fire and the euphoria of knowing that the world was in the palm of his hand, but Brass' voice was louder, and eventually, it blotted her out.

"-ve any enemies?" Greg heard him say.

"What?" he asked dully.

"Do you have any known enemies?"

"Yeah, and so does the rest of the lab. Grissom's got his own fan club at Northern Nevada Correctional, I'm sure, and we've already met several members of the Nick Stokes Admiration Society."

Brass grimaced and Greg knew he was thinking of Nigel Crane, who had secreted himself in Nick's attic, and of Walter Gordon, who had treated Nick to a preview of his own funeral, and of Paul Millander, over whom Grissom had obsessed to the point of mania. He might even have been remembering Sid Goggle, who had nearly bonded Grissom's skull to a lead pipe before Catherine brought him down with three to the chest in the laundry room of his apartment complex. Rapists and perps and erotomaniacs, these were the things a CSI's goblin was made of.

"Point taken," Brass muttered gruffly, and absently turned the coffee pot. "The coffee's almost done."

"You said that already."

"Oh. Yeah. Does, uh-does Grace have any medical conditions that might endanger her further? I mean, I know she uses crutches, but does she take insulin or asthma medications? Is there a possibility she could be pregnant?"

"Aside from her congenital condition, Grace is healthy as a horse. And no, she's not pregnant. She had a Norplant device implanted before we married. It's kinda nice, the two of us. We want to keep it that way for a while."

That heavy, strangling silence filled the room again, crushing and pleuritic, and he wished that Brass would leave or talk about anything but the fact that Grace was missing. He tucked his chin to his chest and willed himself to breathe, but the air was sticky and cloying in his mouth, and his lungs throbbed.

_I'm drowning, _he thought matter-of-factly. _Drowning in 600 cubic feet of sanitized, sterilized air._

"Gr-,"

"No," he said suddenly. "No more. I can't." _I can't breathe. Oh, God, Gracie, I can't breathe._

"Sure, sure," Brass said quickly. "You've given me a few things to run with. I'll get in touch with Mr. Goodman, for starters." He closed his notebook with a snap and made for the door.

"What about your coffee?" Greg called after him. "You were so looking forward to it."

Brass blinked. "Oh. On second thought, it's probably not such a good idea. The doc's been after me to cut back on the caffeine." Then, "Hey, Greg?"

Greg looked at him.

"You got a place to stay? Is there somewhere I can call? I'm sure Ecklie would spring to put you up a few days. I'd offer to let you crash at my place, but under the circumstances-," Brass offered him a bleak, one-shouldered shrug.

"Conflict of interest."

"Yeah." Brass studied the toes of his shoes.

"Don't sweat it. I'll find a place, even if it's the Four Aces."

Brass' lips puckered in a moue of disgust. "One of Vegas' finer lodging chalets," he muttered. "It's on the cheap, though. Ecklie'll love that. Are you sure you don't want-,"

"I'll take care of it."

Brass spared him a last doleful look and trudged out. When he was gone, Greg made no move to call a hotel. Instead, he sat in the room and stared at the far wall until his vision blurred, and when he finally did move, it was to the tan no-man's land of the couch in the crime lab's vestibule. He sat and watched the people pass without seeing them and thought of how beautiful Grace's hair would look artfully fanned over the satin pillow inside her casket.


	6. Drawing Down Dark

Jacob Brubaker sat at his kitchen table, chin propped on his interlaced hands. He thought about fixing himself a sandwich and soup, but the mere thought of food knotted his stomach into a greasy ball of absolute refusal, and in any case, he was trembling so badly that he was just as likely to drop the bread or amputate a finger as he was to fashion anything edible. It was easier to sit and let the sour, rancid-whey tang of adrenaline ebb from his veins and the roof of his mouth while he watched the slow ticking of the second hand on the cuckoo clock over the sink.

Bonnie loved that damnably ugly testament to Swiss tinkering, or had, anyway, until the mealy-mouthed little shit from the forensics lab had gotten on the witness stand in his ill-fitting suit and with his spiked hair and told the judge and God and a jury of the State of Nevada's peers lies about her. He had spoken with a serpent's tongue, and the judge and twelve slack-jawed, dull-witted dolts too stupid to lie their way out of jury duty had believed him.

He could still remember the sharp tock of the gavel in the silent courtroom as the judge passed sentence. It sounded, now that he thought about it, remarkably like the ticking of a clock, and in two strokes, it had robbed him of everything. If he had known then that two seconds would be all that was left to him, he would have fought harder, held on more tightly, stood on his chair and screamed down the halls of justice until he could no longer be ignored, but he hadn't known, and by the time realization dawned, it had been too late. He could only sit in his chair in the gallery, weightless and boneless as straw, as the expressionless bailiff led his weeping wife away and the judge thanked the upstanding citizens of Las Vegas for their time and sacrifice in the name of civic duty.

Sacrifice. As if any of them understood the term. They had lost nothing more than a few days of their lives, days they would have spent in a narcotized haze of television and takeout and whining kids. The summons to jury duty had been a mere inconvenience, and in his more morbid moments, he suspected that the experience had been the highlight of their droll lives, an intriguing sideroad that made for an amusing anecdote at the neighborhood mixer.

_I thought it would be more exciting, you know? Like the courtroom scenes on _Law and Ordera voice said, and in his mind's eye, he saw a smiling, balding suburbanite in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt. The spare tire around his waist bespoke a life of God-granted excess, and his pudgy fingers pinched delicately around the toothpick of a cocktail weenie.

_It shoulda been, _the grinning suburbanite went on, oblivious to the gnawing anger roiling in the belly of the man who had conjured him. _I mean, it had all the trappings-cold-blooded murder, an unlikely suspect, a gruesome crime scene, and a bizarre motive-but it never lived up to the hype. It was mostly a lot of droning speeches and scientific jargon, and sometimes, the perp cried at the defense table, but there was nothing special._

The imaginary juror popped the cocktail weenie into a mouth full of gleaming white teeth and nonchalantly reached for a beer from a nearby cooler. _Anyway, there wasn't much to it. The cops had her dead to rights. It had to be her. The scientific evidence was overwhelming. She said she didn't do it, but isn't that what they all say? How can you argue with fingerprints and DNA? Cased closed in my book. _The juror took a long swallow of beer and sighed in satisfaction. _Let her rot. She got what was coming to her. I just hope I never get called up for jury duty again._

While the jurors had filed out of the courtroom with their conversation fodder, he had returned to his empty house and wandered aimlessly from room to room, occasionally lifting a cherished object from its place, turning it over in anesthetized hands, and setting it gingerly down again without seeing it. He'd opened drawers and hall closets, unsure of what he was searching for, but desperate to find it all the same, and when he had thrown wide all the doors of his life and stirred the dust bunnies from their comfortable slumber atop the linen closet shelves and the slats of the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, he had sat in the middle of the living room floor with a bottle of Jim Beam and a picture of his wedding day and taken long, bitter swallows until the picture blurred into indecipherable blankness.

_You know what you were looking for, _murmured a grimly practical voice. _You were looking for Bonnie, as though you thought she had escaped her captors and sought refuge with the laundry detergent and the spare comforters she kept for guests. Each time you opened a door, you expected to see her huddled in the corner with her knees tucked to her chest, dressed in her flannel pajamas and staring up at you in dumbfounded confusion and childish relief._

All he had found were lint balls and dark corners and the musty smell of spaces long closed. That first night alone in the house, he had passed out on the living room floor, and when he had awoken the next day, the sun had been high in the sky and the carpet had reeked of the whiskey from his overturned bottle. He'd stared at the pungent stain and then at the finger-smudged glass of the wedding photo and made a graceless, lumbering lunge for the closest bathroom to heave his guts.

As bad as the first night had been, the second had proven even worse because there was no whiskey to blunt the sharp edges of involuntary solitude and buffer the memories that had crowded his head until it throbbed. He could only sit in his easy chair and watch the ghosts on his television set and pretend that his bedroom wasn't empty. The flickering images on his television had been a poor and temporary distraction, and eventually, the need for sleep had overridden his fear of the nothingness in his bed.

Except there hadn't been nothing. She had been there, bits and pieces of her infused into the linens and the bedding. Her shampoo was in the pillows, and the lotion she used on her elbows and legs haunted the sheets. The soapy, talcum-powder scent of her skin had overlain everything in an olfactory rime, and he had groaned and fallen into them, fisted the sheets in his burning, trembling hands and buried his face in the lumpy contours of the pillow, the better to capture her in his nostrils.

It had been an agony to sleep beside the revenant of his wife, but it had been an ecstasy, too, because it meant that she was not entirely gone, and so, when the scent of her had begun to fade at the end of the second week, he had been wounded and furious. It had been unfair that he should be robbed of his only solace after losing all else. He'd fought to stem the tide and preserve what he could; he had even started sleeping on top of the comforter so as not to taint her with his own stale sweat, but it had been no use. The more tenaciously he clung to it, the faster it had slipped through his fingers, and at the end of three weeks, there had been no trace of her.

He had stood in his bedroom in his bare feet and rumpled boxers, with the sheets bundled to his chest and pressed against his chin, and he had sniffed them until his nose was dry and scoured. Loose threads had tickled his nose like playful fingers, and his eyes had watered from all the dust and allergens, but his wife's shampoo hadn't greeted him. Just dust and sweat and unwashed fabric, and all the nascent rage and grief he had so stubbornly denied throughout the trial and its aftermath had washed over him in a bilious wave. His knees had buckled, and he'd sunk to the floor with the bedding clutched to his chest and wadded on his lap, and he'd howled to the indifferent walls.

It was in that moment, kneeling on the floor in his boxers with the sheets on his lap and snot dangling from his nose, that he hated Greg Sanders. Before, his enmity had been directed at anyone associated with the witch-hunt that had snared his wife, a diffuse, snarling beast that longed to savage them all in equal measure, but in that instant, it had crystallized, focused to an exquisite point in his stupefied consciousness. It had been an emotion of such purity that he had stopped weeping in mid-sob to savor it, spun sugar in his mouth.

Greg Sanders and his bag of modern magic had been the linchpin on which the case against Bonnie had rested. With his degrees from a respected university and his collection of scientific huggermugger, he had lulled the jury into a state of credulous rapture, and then he had opened his all-American, liar's mouth and woven a spell of DNA and foreign fibers and fingerprint analysis. He hadn't understood a whit, and neither had the jury, if their politely flummoxed expressions had been any indication, but the rhythm of the words and the lulling murmur of knowledge beyond the ken of ordinary men had been enough, and the jurors had sent his wife away on the words of a young pied piper in a three-piece suit.

His focused hatred had chiseled away the extraneous images of the trial until only Sanders remained. In a perverse irony, his face was now more familiar than the face of his wife. Oh, he could still recall the color of her eyes or the set of her nose, but the smaller, more intimate details had been forgotten. He could no longer remember, for instance, the sweep of her hair from the slender nape of her neck or the way her face looked when she stood on the front porch and turned her face toward the sun. He knew that they were beautiful, these things, or had been before Sanders and his lambskin superiority had torn them away, but their beauty was far away and wistful, and no longer moved him.

_Oh, it still moves you, _croaked a tenebrous, cruel voice inside his head. _Just not like it used to. Once, it made you ache with happiness and sweet longing. She was your private Venus, standing on the porch with one hand on the wooden support column and her face tipped toward the sun. When the light was right, it erased the crows' feet nestled in the corners of her eyes and mouth, and she was lovely as the summer rose she had been when you met her twenty-three years ago. You used to sit in the rickety, rattan chair with a beer in your hand and sneak surreptitious glances at her while you thumbed through the newspaper and congratulated yourself on your good fortune. If she was close enough, you'd reach out and thread your fingers through her hair._

_Now the beauty and grace that so moved you makes your heart ache for its very absence. You can no longer touch her hair or let your idle fingers stray to her nape. There is plexiglass to stop your fingers. You have been tempted more than once to smash it, but you never quite dare. The light plastic chair in which you sit during your weekly pilgrimage is not sturdy enough to bear the full brunt of your rage, and even if it were, the sloe-eyed guards who oversee your visitation would bring you down before you achieved your end, lions bringing down a fear-crazed ibis. So you curl your hands around the sides of the chair and force your grinding teeth into a rictus only a madman would call a smile and gaze at Bonnie through the finger-smeared pane._

_Prison has leached her of her vitality, rendered her a shuffling, slack-jawed Nosferatu in leg shackles. Her auburn hair has turned a dull, dishwater grey to match the walls of the prison and the sexless, grey jumpsuit that has become her second skin. Her hands are thin, rough, and milky as whey from the lack of sunlight. When she lays them palms-down on the table, you can trace the network of veins beneath the flesh, even the minute capillaries, and your stomach roils._

_Her eyes are the worst, opaque pebbles pressed carelessly into slack, doughy flesh. They respond to light, but produce none of their own. When she smiles, it does not reach them as it once did. It withers and dies in the twisted corners of her mouth, and her eyes remain as cold and blank as doused embers. They are shuttered and dark, and nothing you say kindles the faintest spark of interest. Sometimes you wonder if the figure behind the plexiglass is Bonnie at all, and not an automaton fashioned from the worn lives and souls the prison has devoured over the years. You drive home in ninety-degree weather and shiver all the way there, and when you get there, you take a scalding shower to rid yourself of the taint._

But he hadn't gotten rid of it. No matter how feverishly he scrubbed, it had clung to him, fine and unseen as cobwebs against his skin, and it had gradually spread to everything else-clothes, furniture, the carpet. Near the end, just before he'd fled the house with nothing but his wallet and the stupid cuckoo clock that now hung on the far wall, it had invaded the shower itself, hidden beneath the layer of mildew and soap scum that had accrued without Bonnie to keep it at bay.

He'd spent twenty-three years in that house, building a life with the work of his hands. For a time, he had dreamed of rocking cradles within its rooms, but it wasn't meant to be, and when that dream had been tearfully lain to rest by a specialist's pronouncement of profound uterine scarring from undetected endometriosis, he and Bonnie had tended others. He'd talked now and again of opening a furniture repair shop, and Bonnie had passed the seasons and years with her windowbox garden, undaunted by the blistering desert heat. Sometimes, green things poked determined shoots above the soil; most of the time, they didn't, but that was all right. It was enough for her to know that the opportunity to reach for the sun had been given.

There had been no repair shop, no sawdust and warm sugared banana smell of freshly hewn wood, and when last he'd seen it, the windowbox garden had been barren and dead, its potting soil dry as ash. The incubator in which they'd nursed their fragile dreams stood abandoned and dark, surrendered to the dust and the creeping rot of the prison. His wedding picture still hung in the entryway for any passing spirits to see.

And it was all Greg Sanders' doing.

Unlike the timid flowers in Bonnie's windowbox garden, his hatred for Sanders had blossomed and thrived in the hothouse heat of his rage and the long Vegas summer, a deadly lotus flower with vines dark as ichor and latticed with thorns of nightshade poison. He nurtured it with liberal applications of Jim Beam and the curdled, galling memory of Sanders' smug face on the witness stand. It grew and sharpened until he could recall the shaving nick on his throat that had bobbed with the movement of his Adam's apple. Soon, it blotted out all else even unto his wife's face as it sought out the sun, and this final act of hubris made him all the angrier.

He could remember the precise moment when muddled grief had given way to vengeance. He'd been masturbating joylessly into his loosely fisted fingers, mouth open in a soundless gape as his hips duplicated the primal rhythm of sex against the flat, unyielding plane of the hard mattress. Bonnie had been in his mind's eye, ripe and full with the maturity of years and absolutely exquisite. His fingers and mouth had ached and throbbed with the phantom heft of a breast and the sharp just of hip. He had tasted her on his tongue, salt and heated flesh and cocoa butter, and the sweet delirium had burned in his veins, a heady, purifying fever. Fingers had flexed and clenched, and hips had thrust erratically with the frenzied promise of release, and he had allowed himself a ragged exhalation of triumph.

Then, just as the pleasure had crested, Bonnie was gone, and Sanders' arrogant face peered down at him, lips curved in a cocksure smile. Rage had swallowed ecstasy, but he'd been too far gone, and he'd come hard onto his hand and the sheets, hot and sticky and bitter in his nose. The bastard had breached his fantasies, had insinuated himself into his most private solace, and lying atop the sheets in a boneless puddle with cooling, bitter come on his fingers, he'd found his second calling. He'd spent the rest of the night staring at the flyspecks on the ceiling and turning various scenarios over in his mind and rolling them on his tongue, a sommelier sampling a rare vintage.

It had been surprisingly easy once he'd made up his mind. The address for the Clark County crime lab was a matter of public record, and so all he'd had to do was drive there in his old Chevy Tahoe and wait for him to come out. When he did, he'd simply followed him home. There had been no cloak-and-dagger theatrics, no slouching behind the wheel and concealing his face beneath the bill of an old ballcap. It had been painfully pedestrian, two working stiffs driving home from work, and when Sanders had coasted into the parking lot of his shoddy complex and opened the door, there had been no dramatic moment of recognition. He'd merely glanced at him in idle curiosity and gone inside without a backward glance.

He'd wanted to leap out of his truck and wrap his fingers around his quarry's unsuspecting throat, throttle him there on the asphalt and watch as recognition dawned in his eyes even as the life bled out, but had been too risky, too exposed. A passing neighbor might have interrupted him and denied him his deserved justice, and that was a chance he'd been unwilling to take. Besides, Bonnie had spoken up inside his head then, sweet and low and soothing as balm.

_Patience, Jacob, _she'd whispered, and the familiar voice had sent a ripple of longing up his spine. _Do it right. Do it slow. Revenge is a dish best served cold._

So he'd driven away with his hands clamped to the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip and sworn that he'd present her a dish cold as arctic frost.

He'd filed appeals on Bonnie's behalf and spoken with her lawyer about the possibility of overturning the verdict on an obscure technicality, but while he'd waited for the reams of paperwork to filter their way through the sluggish, indifferent digestive tract of the judicial system, he'd sat in his car on the most distant perimeter of the crime lab parking lot and watched the comings and goings of his nemesis.

Despite his unconventional appearance, Sanders had turned out to be remarkably dependable. The time of his departure was never fixed, but whenever he left, he always whistled as he walked to his car and twirled his keys nonchalantly around his index finger. On the rare days he didn't report to work, he never left the apartment, and on those days, Brubaker would sit in the truck and stare at the hazy glow of the television set behind closed blinds, letting his mind drift and taking long pulls from the bottle of Jim Beam nestled securely against his crotch. His mother-God rest her soul-had always told him that idle hands were the Devil's workshop, and he supposed that she would have heartily disapproved of the long hours spent sitting in a truck, but it was not sloth that drove him to his task at the appointed hour. It was purpose, and he never felt more alive than when he was stationed at the post he had designated for himself.

He had wanted Sanders at first. He'd intended to dent his skull with a concrete block or the blade of a shovel, abscond with him into the Nevada desert, and strip him of his dignity and life with no one but the scorpions and buzzards to bear witness. He'd fantasized about it during his endless vigils in the truck, painted it on the limitless canvas of his imagination in loving detail and rendered it again in the tendrils and whorls of cigarette smoke that drifted lazily from his mouth. He'd let his head loll and dreamed of blood and screams and Sanders pleading for mercy with snot on his face. It was narcosis, and when he succumbed to the daydreams, the wounds were not so deep.

The one he'd liked most saw Sanders spreadeagle on the scorching sand, bound to the desert by four stakes pounded into the hardpan. There were no clothes to shield him from the blind, lidless fury of the sun or the skittering, chitinous claws of the biting, slithering creatures of the earth. The sun broiled his skin, turned it pink and red and purple-black, and the insects crawled over him with their sharp, pitiless legs, living needles in his cooked flesh. Sanders would plead, scream, and curse. Perhaps he would waste valuable moisture by weeping or urinating on himself, but there would be no Divine intervention, no pang of conscience to spare him.

There would only be the long, remorseless shadow on the periphery of his vision, retribution come on darkest and slowest wings. It would take him days to die, endless, timeless, excruciating days. His lips would crack and bleed and blacken for want of moisture, and his organs, in a desperate bid for survival, would steal water from wherever they could, until his eyes dried and guttered to darkness in their sockets and his tongue shriveled to jerky in his mouth.

He would be there for every moment, crouched beneath the protective shade of a beach umbrella like a monstrous buzzard. He would watch Sanders' body collapse in upon itself and the violent convulsions that presaged death, and when the last pitiful cry had been wrenched from his wasted throat and his body surrendered the last vestiges of life in a gassy, septic stink, he would smile his vulpine smile and drink a celebratory beer. It would taste cool and good on his parched throat, and he would savor it as victor's ambrosia. He would drink until his belly sloshed and his bladder was distended and hot, and then he would piss on the earthly remains of his enemy and leave them for the crows and the coyotes. Bones would bleach in the sun, and as they brightened, the nightmares would fade.

It was a simple plan, a beautiful plan, and he had been fully prepared to carry it out. And then, on one of his forays to Sanders' apartment, he'd seen the woman, and all his well-laid plans had disappeared in a flashfire of epiphany. He couldn't see much of her-just a flash of red hair-but he had seen the way Sanders had reached for her before the door was fully open, the eager grasp of his arms around her neck. He'd known then what he would take, and it would cut more deeply than the torturous loss of his misbegotten life.

He would show Sanders how the other half lived. He would steal his touchstone, his precious, living, breathing animus. Let him lie in a bed and grope for that which was not there and never would be again. Let him fumble blindly in the sheets for a memory of her, press his nose to the mattress for the merest whiff of her and strain his stinging eyes for an outline of her against the pillows. It would be his turn to grip his come-slick cock in trembling, numb fingers and fuck old memories grown hazy with grief and booze and the passage of time; maybe in the instant before he turned inside out and the world supernovaed white, he would see his-Brubaker's- face leering at him.

He shuddered at the thought and wondered if Sanders would be so sure of the justice system he had so smugly championed on the witness stand. He had sworn under God that he and his cronies had committed no error in their search for the truth, and his voice had been strong and steady when he spoke, anchored in unassailable faith. But would he still be so certain now that roles had been so rudely reversed? Would he still swear by the infallibility of his comrades and the whirring, clicking machines upon which so many helpless fates rested? He thought not, and it pleased him to no end.

He envisioned Sanders wandering the sacrosanct, sanitized halls of the crime lab, drifting from room to room and office to office with no purpose, searching aimlessly for salvation, for a fragile kernel of hope to which he could cling.

_He'll be pariah among his own kind, _Bonnie cooed. _Everywhere he turns, he will see his wife's face and the places she used to be, and their emptiness will burn in his belly and twist in his heart. He will be a ghost among the living, a shade that is felt but never touched. Colleagues will see him and avert their eyes and not know why, and he will hear their conspiratorial whispers and wonder if they are doing all they can to find his soul before it's too late. No matter what they tell him, he will not believe because he has seen them eating and drinking and sleeping as though the world is still in order, and because his guilty conscience knows the truth. He will be a shadowman in the world of light, invisible, yet terribly exposed, and he will bleed._

The thought ignited a logy, erotic warmth in his stomach, and he smiled. The cuckoo clock struck the hour, and the little canary emerged from his artificial, airless nest in a merry dazzle of yellow. He watched, bemused, as it darted forward and trilled in glorious herald of five o'clock in the morning. He couldn't remember why he had chosen it, of all things, to bring to the cabin. It was hideously incongruous with the rest of the décor, and when he had first lain eyes on it, he'd hated it.

_You brought it because Bonnie adored it. You were with her when she saw it at the rummage sale, and you knew even before she made a beeline for it that you'd be bringing it home. Your protests that it was ugly and tacky fell on deaf ears, and her eyes were alight with childish pleasure when she plucked it from the table. The old coot in charge of the sale wanted ten dollars, but you wangled it to five, and she carried it home on her lap, cradled in the crook of her arm like a puppy. She twittered about it all the way home, and though you still found it ugly, her enthusiasm made it bearable. You brought it to serve as a reminder of your purpose, a flint of wood and glue to keep your anger a bright, fierce flame._

He rose from the table with a grimace and stretched until his vertebrae popped. A muscle in his lower back gave a hot, sizzling twinge of protest, and he grunted as he shambled stiffly towards the small spare bedroom in the rear of the cabin. As soon as he was finished, he was going to take a hot sitz bath. Fifty-three had never felt so damned old, but he was determined that his body hold out for the next few days-the next five, to be exact. He had waited too long to accept any other outcome. After that, it could do as it pleased.

He took a last look at the cuckoo clock and went to greet his houseguest.


	7. Reach Out, Touch Faith

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders is a figment of my imagination. **Contains Spoilers until S6.**

Gil Grissom was not in the habit of lying to himself, and so he did not. Sitting in his office and staring at the fetal pig as it floated in the ersatz amniotic fluid of the jar, he knew that Agent Rick Culpepper of the FBI was an inevitability who would soon darken his door. He would come with his spit-polished, leather shoes, impossibly white teeth, and meticulously slicked hair, and he would use his people as pawns with the full measure of his government clout. Greg's life would be turned upside down and inside out, and Greg would be hulled and shucked, disassembled until all that remained was a quivering husk and wounded innocence, and when there was nothing left for Culpepper to strip and poison with his empty accusations and unbridled ambition, he would offer emptier condolences and leave him to clean up the mess.

_Not that there'll be much to clean up. Greg has already been hollowed. He's been in a daze since you broke the news, and when last you checked, he was in the lab vestibule, putting down roots in the vinyl couch and unplugging from this unpleasant reality with every sluggish blink of his eyes. He was there when you left with the team, and he was there when you returned with the faint traces of his wife in baggies and sterile phials. His eyes followed your progress down the hall, but he did not follow. He'll still be there tomorrow if no one goes to peel him off and lead him away, ripening with the tart stink of unwashed body and quiet, sinking despair._

Theoretically, here at the lab was the last place Greg needed to be. Eventually, the numb stupor in which he had encased himself would fade, and in its place would come the blind rage and the need for answers. He would linger in the doorways of the Trace Lab or the DNA Lab like a harried phantom, eyes wide and entreating, his grief a fatal distraction to the team. And if the answers did not come quickly enough-and they never did to a heart throbbing in the throes of a mortal wound-he would be tempted to take matters into his own hands. Just one moment of carelessness or exhausted inattention was all he would need, and all their work would be undone by a slick defense attorney in a three-piece suit. Grace Sanders could be found beneath the floorboards of his client's house with his DNA smeared over her violated corpse like rancid frosting, and the merest whiff of tampering would earn an acquittal. He knew he should send Greg away, for his safety and the integrity of the lab.

But for once, he could not bring himself to put a solid theory into practice. Its logic was flawless, but its perfection held no beauty for him. It fact, it was possessed of a cold ugliness when held up beside Greg's pale face and haunted, bruised eyes. There was no humanity in it, no gentleness. It was the bureaucratic ass-covering he so despised in Conrad Ecklie, sanitized and sterilized and utterly devoid of emotional sentiment.

_Since when have you cared about humanity or gentleness? _Catherine scoffed inside his head. _With you, it's always been about facts and figures and what you can prove. You like bugs because they're predictable. They all have six legs and too many eyes, and none of them will ever call you up on a Friday night, wasted to the gills and wanting to talk about old times._

_That's because insects don't have gills, Catherine, _his logical mind countered. _And they don't all have six legs, either. Spiders have eight._

Whatever. The point is, you've never cared about any of those things before, so why start now?

He opened his mouth to protest that that was unfair, that he did care about those things and always had, and then an image arose in his mind of Catherine after the Adam Novak incident, when she had attracted the attention of a sleazy attorney cum murder suspect. She had tried, in her sly, flirtatious way to put the matter behind her-behind them-and he had only brushed her aside, secure in the invulnerability of the cocoon in which he'd so smugly swaddled himself.

_How long is this going to go on? _she'd asked in exasperation when her playful gambit had been met with a put-upon sigh and the shuffling of papers in the manila folder he'd been carrying.

_I don't know, Catherine_, he'd replied, aloof and dismissive.

_I went out after work for a drink. Is it a crime to want a little human contact_? she'd cried, hurt and stunned at his smug self-righteousness.

_And what did you tell her? _prodded the remorseless, analytical voice of his conscience. _Did you offer her a pat on the shoulder and a sincere, _Don't make that mistake again, Cath. You could have been badly hurt._? No, you didn't. You looked her in the eye and said, _That's why I don't go out _with a straight face and left her in the wake of your unassailable virtue._

_You never apologized to her for that. After all, how can one apologize for absolute moral rectitude? You were right, and she was wrong, and that was that, except that nothing has been quite the same between you since that day. You've no doubt that she still considers you a friend and would leap into the breach on your behalf without a whimper or a backward glance, but the ease and warmth you have always had is no longer there, and she is no longer so quick to confide in you. Sometimes you wonder now how different things might be if you had had the common sense to say anything other than what you did in that hallway. Maybe if you had, she would have told you about Sam Braun's check sooner than she did, and perhaps you wouldn't pass her in the hallway and ponder what else she no longer cares to tell you._

_Nor is she the only one. There's Sara, of course. She's followed you from the lecture halls of Harvard to the dry, desert hardpan of Vegas, and she still isn't good enough. You have rejected her every overture and driven her to drink, and when you smell the beer and menthol on her breath, you turn away because it is the smell of dying hope. She was once vivacious and pretty, but not anymore. She fell under your corrosive spell, and like your beloved spider, you bound her to you and drained her of all vitality._

_That's not fair, _he protested. _I never led her on, never let her think there was a chance for anything between us. I told her there could be nothing. If she chose to hope otherwise in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, then, I'm very sorry, but the fault is not mine. Adults sometimes have to live with unkind and unpopular decisions._

_Like you do? _the voice challenged.

_That's my job as a scientist and as the assistant director of this lab._

_Your dependence upon science won't save you now. In fact, science had nothing to do with why you drove Sara away and turned her inward to herself. You did that because you were afraid, and fear is the oldest and basest emotion of mankind. You were terrified of the feelings she aroused in you, the jealous want and the animalistic need. You were a scientist, self-contained and above the muddled. Illogical morass of human interaction, and you could not understand why you often woken in the middle of the night and found your perfectly serviceable, tidy double bed was simultaneously too confining and too empty, nor could you comprehend why the scientific refutation of such an erroneous perception brought you no comfort._

_That isn't true. As assistant director, a relationship with a subordinate would have been inappropriate. I had to consider the integrity of the lab and the cases it handled._

_And your career, of course, _the voice pointed out mercilessly, and now it reminded him of Conrad. _That first and foremost. You may hate my guts, Grissom-and I can assure you that the feeling is entirely mutual-but we're not that different when you get down to the brass tacks. You can thumb your nose at me and call me an amoral, social-climbing, glad-handing asshole until you get your rocks off, but you cling to your career as tenaciously as I do. You hid from your team for more than a year because you didn't want them to know that you were going deaf. You were so afraid of being found out that you left them to be eviscerated by a high-powered, ball-busting attorney for some hot-shot Hollywood punk. Oh, you mounted a heroic, last-minute charge to save the day, but not before each of their reputations had sustained monumental damage. Yours, though, was immaculate as ever, wasn't it?_

_So your integrity excuse is bullshit, Gil, because if you'd had half as much as you like to think, you wouldn't have let your team take the bullet while you hid in your office. Your refusal to go to bed with Sidle had nothing to do with your vaunted integrity and everything to do with your terror of ending up like Sanders, sitting on a couch somewhere and watching your world go by in a caravan of evidence bags._

He was perversely relieved that the subject had returned to Greg. What was happening now was about him, not the Many Failures and Unexpiated Sins of Gilbert Grissom, Scientist. To think about Greg was-

_Safer? _offered the voice of pitiless self-examination, and the Conrad Ecklie lodged in the basement of his subconscious smiled over the soggy rim of his styrofoam coffee cup.

_More appropriate, _he amended primly, and pinched the aching bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

The Sanders' apartment had obliterated any hope that it was anything other than a crime scene. Even if he had been able to explain away the flower petals and the shattered glass and the ominous blood pool over which Nick had been hunched when he arrived, the crutch leaning haphazardly against the table would have spoken the truth, as would its sister crutch, lying in the middle of the living room like a severed limb left behind in haste. The moment he had seen them, he had known that Agent Rick Culpepper would be receiving a phone call.

He had never met Grace Sanders, but he had signed off on Greg's change of insurance forms, and life with his mother and his insatiable curiosity had given him a nodding acquaintance with other disabilities. Ataxic Cerebral Palsy had bound Grace Sanders to her crutches with an iron tether, and she would not have left them behind. They were her legs and her center of gravity, and without them, she would be a virtual amputee, helpless and floundering on her atrophied legs. Had she marshaled the will to move without them, the anticipation tremors triggered by adrenaline and the fight-or-flight reflex would have ensured that the signals sent from her rapidly-firing neurons and synapses emerged as a disorganized spate of random spasms and flailings. Her abductor wouldn't have had to subdue her; her body would have done so of its own accord.

_Those crutches were her spine and her independence. Without them, she has no chance, and you know it. That's why you insisted on taking them into evidence yourself and being the one to bring them back to the lab. You didn't want Greg to see them with blood stippled down the aluminum and smeared on the tip. You didn't want him to see the dent just above the rubber tip on the right crutch. It would have been as indecent and alarming as seeing his wife's body being paraded down the corridor, so you pressed the clear, plastic evidence bag to your side and wedged yourself between Warrick and Nick, used their bulk to hide your sad burden from Greg's desperate, anguished eyes as you passed._

_Everybody has a piece of the evidence now. Nick has the blood pool from the carpet, and Warrick has prints. Sara and Catherine have trace, and Archie has Grace's laptop. Doc Robbins is the odd man out at the moment, cloistered in his cool, sterile morgue with no body to tend with his gloved hands and efficient scalpel, but it won't be long now. A day or a week from now, someone will find Grace Sanders, and Dave will collect her and bring her to Greg's home away from home. Doc will brush the leaves from her hair, and Dave will wash the grit from the bruised soles of her feet, and together, they'll gather the pieces of the puzzle for you to put together again with your infinite, soulless patience. When it's over, you'll be able to tell Greg a fairy tale from which the Brothers Grimm would have turned their heads._

_You'll see to the crutches yourself. They are the most sacred of the relics taken from the apartment, and if anyone must profane them, it will be you. You will lay them on your metal table and brush the dirt from their battered metal with a soft-bristle brush, the bones of a dinosaur lain bare. You will collect the dirt and the dust and the sloughed skin cells from the cuffs and the handgrips, and under the powerful light of your microscopes, their story will unfold._

_They will speak of daily use, of gummy-eyed mornings passed tottering to the bathroom on unsteady, sluggish legs, and of afternoons spent stumping around the worn pile of the living room carpet or hobbling down the sandy sidewalk to the corner store. They might even whisper of an amorous meeting. If you are lucky, they will testify to nothing but life, but if they are as cruel as you suspect, they will murmur of darker treats, of death and decay, and of minute traces of hair and blood spatter and brain tissue. _

Yes, he would handle the crutches, but first, he had to settle the unpleasant business of calling the buzzard to the tantalizing whiff of carrion. He opened the topmost drawer of his desk and rummaged through the well-ordered contents until his sensitive fingertips found the business card in the furthermost corner. He had a Rolodex perched on the corner of his desk, and it contained every contact he had ever made in the field, all ordered alphabetically. Except for Agent Rick Culpepper's card. For some reason, he couldn't bring himself to include it with the others, and he had shoved it into the darkest corner of his desk.

_Because it was tainted, _whispered an irrational voice. _It was permeated with his oozing arrogance and blatant disregard for human life-Sara's life. It was sticky with his finger oils and smelled of wool and linen and the musky, overbearing reek of his expensive cologne. Your skin recoiled from it instinctively, as if it sensed the corrosive malevolence lurking within the fibers and embossed letters of his name, and you separated it from the rest because you were afraid the contagion would spread to the better people tethered to the plastic axis of your world. It was counter to every logical tenet by which you had lived your life; intellect insisted that it was nothing but fancy linen paper and human pretension, but that didn't stop you from shunning it._

He held the card between his thumb and index finger, and his lips puckered in an unconscious moue of distaste. Images flickered through his mind of Culpepper sitting in a surveillance van, watching Sara entice a wolf out of the shadows with her aura of naïve vulnerability. He had been so nonchalant, almost lupine himself, crouched in his chair with the headset clapped to his ear and a predatory grin playing in the corners of his mouth like the sharpening of claws. For a petty, swooning instant, he had toyed with the notion that Culpepper was the wolf, and then the real one had sprung from the darkness and missed Sara by inches. Culpepper had been so glib when it was over and Sara had been cocooned in the drab, grey security of an ambulance blanket, so unconcerned about the risk she had taken, and Grissom had loathed him. In fact, Culpepper had earned the dubious honor of vaulting Conrad Ecklie in his personal pantheon of incorrigible bastards.

_Well, there's no help for it now, Gil,_ his mother said briskly, and he heard her unbreathed huff of maternal exasperation. _Culpepper might be an inconsiderate ass, but he's an ass with authority, and like it or not, those investigatory protocols you hold so near and dear demand that you call him. It's like that purple cough medicine you always hated so much; the label proclaimed its natural grape goodness, but you swore it tasted like turpentine and made me chase you around the house with threats of a spanking before you'd relent. It's time to take your medicine, Gil, dear. Soonest begun, soonest done._

He grimaced and swallowed his hatred like a clotted lump of gristle. He was just about to lift the receiver when the phone rang, strident and shrill. He blinked and picked it up, convinced it would be Culpepper on the other end, that his spit-polished nemesis was a precognitive savant attuned to his slightest discomfiture.

"Grissom," he told the receiver, and stifled the dry _Agent Culpepper _with a heroic effort of will.

A crackling burst of static, a nasally rasp. "Mr. Grissom." Polite.

"Yes?"

"I believe I have something you want."

The hackles rose on his neck, and he groped for his pen. "And what would that be, Mr-?"

A thoughtful silence. "We'll get to that. But what you're looking for has red hair, a temper to match, and faulty legs."

_Grace Sanders. _His stomach lurched, and his palms began to sweat, but his voice was eerily calm. "Is she alive?"

A reedy chuckle. "Of course she is, Mr. Grissom. I wouldn't go to all this trouble to kill her. If I'd wanted that, I'd've killed her and left her on the living room floor for that arrogant little prick to find."

"Greg." It was not a question.

"Yes, Mr. Grissom. Though I understand why you'd ask yourself the question. You've got a regular menagerie of assholes and morons at that lab of yours."

"I'm not sure what this is about," he said cautiously, but I can assure you that the Las Vegas police are willing to negotiate."

"This isn't about negotiation," the voice interrupted coldly. "This is about life. It's not something you can measure with your neat little swabs and slides and expert testimony. It's an intangible, and even the pointy-headed philosophers agreed that it's precious. If you don't do exactly what I tell you, the woman dies."

Adrenaline and bile flooded his mouth in a sickly-sour tang. "And what is it that you want?" he asked evenly, and glanced through the open door of his office in the delirious hope of seeing Brass peering around the doorframe in hangdog expectancy. But the hallway was deserted. Everyone was processing evidence in their respective labs.

_I need a trace on this phone,_ he thought, and scribbled a note on his desk calendar.

"Justice," came the reply. "It shouldn't be too hard to come by. After all, it's in the science, and you're a scientist."

The vicious irony of the statement was not lost on him. "I'm not sure-,"

"I'll make it simple for you, Mr. Grissom. I'm going to hang up now, and in two minutes, I want Greg Sanders on that phone. If it's anyone else, she dies."

"How do I know she's alive?"

"You don't. Two minutes, Mr. Grissom." The line went dead.

He slammed the receiver into its cradle, immediately picked it up again, and dialed the extension for the AV lab. The line was busy. He hung up and shot to his feet, ballpoint pen clutched heedlessly in one tight-fisted, nerveless hand. He was merely striding at first, but by the time he reached the door to his office, he was running.

_It's personal,_ he thought with clinical clarity as he sprinted down the hallway like the world's oldest collegiate track runner. _It's not business or politics or an eco-terrorist group on the rampage because our precipitate is manufactured by a company that uses animal testing. It's a disgruntled ex-boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend, bent out of shape because Greg was a connoisseur of liquid latex and the use of Propecia for his hydraulic system. The wrong name came out in bed one night, and now Greg is paying the price._

_Maybe he should take a page out of your social playbook and never leave the house, _Catherine muttered laconically.

_No offense, Gil, _Brass piped up, _but unless you think Greg spent his singles days wowing the ladies with tales of his hep-kat boss, Gil Grissom and the Six-Legged Seven, I don't think this has jack to do with his love life. Someone else's love life, maybe, but not his. It's a case. Just like Nick, who's tasted lightning twice. Somebody he put away has come back to give him a heaping helping of a dish best served cold, or maybe it's a DA who's pissed that the evidence wasn't enough to put the pedophile away. _

He ran, and with each slap of his feet, a face gazed up at him, the cards of the forensic tarot upturned. Nick, the Hanged Man, trapped in a madman's box while dirt sifted through his coffin like stardust from a black hole. Catherine, The Empress, born to mobster royalty. Sara, The Fool, who chased rainbows and butterflies and paupers in a prince's clothing. Warrick, The Knave, held in thrall by diamonds of red and black.

And Greg, The Jester, or so he should have been, but the card staring up at him with Greg's face was a darker card by far. Death.

_Because Greg is all your fault. He became a CSI because of you. He wanted to impress you, but no matter how prompt and thorough he was with his DNA work, it never earned him so much as a pat on the back. After all, perfection was a prerequisite of the job. He tried to draw you into his world, share with you the anecdotes that made Greg Sanders who he was; he told you about Papa Olaf and Nana Olaf and weekends spent with pretty girls on the shores of Lake Meade. But you didn't want to hear it because it was irrelevant to the task at hand. _

_He followed gamely in your wake, and when his track record in the lab wasn't good enough, he followed you into the field. He studied the procedural manuals with feverish tenacity, as if his life depended on it, and maybe it did. What he lacked in common-sense experience, he made up for in enthusiasm. He was willing to listen and learn, even if each rebuke from you stung him like a slap._

He was so proud when he passed the final field proficiency test, and you still remember the way he looked at you through the bubbling shower of spraying champagne, hopeful and adoring and determined not to disappoint you again. You should have told him that he had never let you down and never would, but you didn't. It was too hard, too dangerous. You only told Nick how proud of him you were after you'd nearly lost him, and even then, you didn't tell him. You told the flickering computer screen in the AV lab, which was in no danger of talking back. Because that's how you like your social interaction-one-sided. Well, now we're on the fourth verse, same as the first, and you haven't learned a damn thing.

The AV lab was dark except for the flickering, wavering light of the computer monitors, but he could just make out the lanky silhouette of Archie Johnson hunkered in front of the lab phone with the receiver cradled between cheek and shoulder.

Grissom plucked the phone from his ear and slammed it into the cradle.

"Hey, Grissom, what the-," Archie began incredulously.

"Archie, I need you to set up a trace on my office phone. You've got-," He checked his watch. "-ninety seconds."

Archie stared at him in bewilderment. "I-but-I'm on it." He lunged for a set of headphones and a nearby laptop and sprinted from the room.

Grissom turned on his heel and ran into the vestibule in search of Greg. He was still where despair had planted him several hours earlier, wilted on the sofa with his head in his hands.

"Greg."

Greg's head shot up at the sound of his voice. "Grissom? Did you find her? Did you find Grace?" Choked and panicky with hope and terror.

He shook his head. "No, Greg. But you have to come with me right now."

"What? Why?"

Grissom seized him by the arm and tugged him in the direction of his office. "I don't have time to explain. We've got less than sixty seconds."

Greg wrenched free of his leading grasp. "Sixty seconds for what?" he demanded hoarsely. His eyes were raw and anguished, and Grissom thought he had tears on his breath.

"If anyone but you answers my phone, she dies."

Greg wobbled precariously on his feet and then sprinted down the hall, feet a blur on the white linoleum. Grissom could only follow. By the time he caught up, Greg was looming over Archie, who was frantically plugging wires into the back of his laptop.

"I'm doing the best I can, Grissom, I swear," he said when Grissom opened his mouth to remind him of the relentless onward march of the second hand. "You're asking for a miracle." Archie tapped frantically on his keyboard, squinted at the screen, swore under his breath, and pulled a plug from the back of his laptop. "I need another minute."

"You have twenty seconds."

Archie looked from him to Greg's pinched, bloodless face and trembling hands and redoubled his pace. "Come on, come on."

The phone rang just as Archie snapped the last plug into its port.

"Did you get it?" Grissom asked.

_I don't know_, Archie mouthed, and squatted in front of the laptop.

The phone rang again, and Greg flinched, hand fisted and sweating at his side.

"Answer the phone, Greg," Grissom prodded gently.

Greg looked at him, eyes glassy and shocked. His mouth worked. The phone rang again. "Gris, what if she's dead? I can't…I…what if he's calling to tell me she's dead?"

"Pick up the phone, Greg. Right now, it's the only choice you have."

Greg's hand floated out and hovered over the receiver. The phone rang a fourth time, then a fifth. "Gris, she's-,"

"If you don't pick it up right now, Greg, she's dead," he snapped, and Greg's paralysis broke.

He snatched the phone from its cradle. "Hello?" he breathed.


	8. Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Grace on the Clock

"Greg?" Soft and timid and wavering.

"Oh, God, Gracie." The endearment emerged from his lips unbidden, but he couldn't find it within himself to care. All that mattered was her voice against his ear, familiar as breath and soft as petals despite the tinny distance of the phone line. He closed his eyes, and in the momentary darkness before he opened them again, he saw her hair, red as cleansing fire and fragrant as the leaves that drifted lazily to earth to form constantly shifting dunes beneath the trees on Papa Olaf's farm. "Grace, are you all right? Did he hurt you?"

_That's not what you really want to know, is it? _asked a glottal, malignant voice. _What you really want to know is, _Did he fuck you, Gracie? Has he stuck his pecker in my sacred mount? _It's not as pretty or delicate as the way you phrased it, but it's truer. It's the first question every man asks when told their wife or daughter has been found alive. Not _Is she asking for me? _or _Was she beaten? _but _Was she raped? _They always hesitate on that last word, as though saying it will be enough to make it come true. It's bitter and heavy in their puckered mouths, and they spit it out like it was poison._

_Maybe it is, _offered a more practical voice that bore a perverse resemblance to Grissom. _What is rape if not corruption of the flesh, the forced acceptance of something foreign into the body? Even after the physical evidence of trauma has been collected or washed away, the psychological consequences linger for years, sometimes a lifetime. Maybe sexual assault is nothing more than a slow-acting poison that consumes the victim from the inside, a corrosion of the soul that sours everything it touches. It would explain why so many women admit to thoughts of suicide after the attack. They'd rather die quickly and on their own terms than wait for the rapist to finish them off. A final act of control over a life that has none._

_Yes, but all of that still doesn't explain why that's the first thing men ask. Is it because deep down in their guts and balls, they still see women as creatures to be possessed, property to be jealously guarded with clubs and fists and war cries? Let's face it, Greggo, you're all for equality in the workplace and the right of women to say and do whatever they want and to reject any loser who doesn't tickle their fancy. You're a man of the world, and you'd never raise a hand to a woman, but all your sophistication goes out the window when you catch the stockboy at the grocery store looking down her blouse. _

_Then it's simple, primitive jealousy, and you wind up putting your arm around her in a gesture clearly meant to denote possession before you saunter away. She's yours. The justice of the peace in California said so. She's yours to love and touch and fuck, and the thought of anyone else touching her makes you sick_.

Of course Grace was his. _She _had said so in front of the justice of the peace, had sworn it in moist-eyed solemnity. She had given herself to him in a Westin motel room that afternoon and that night. She was his because she chose to be, and he was well aware that one day, she might choose not to be, that one day, she might be waiting for him with a suitcase and a sad smile. It was a risk he took gladly for the chance that she might be there for one more hour, one more day, and every day that he turned to find her there, he breathed a little easier.

The voice was right about one thing, though. The thought of Grace's beautiful red hair underneath someone else's rough, dirty hands or in another mouth made his stomach cramp and roll. He swallowed a wave of bile.

"I-," she began, but that was as far as she got before there was the clicking shift of jostling phone and another voice came on the line.

"That's enough for now," it said, and Greg blinked.

Ever since Grissom had come to him with news of Grace's disappearance, he had been bracing himself for the voices that would come. Mostly, he'd replayed in his mind the way Jim Brass' voice would sound when he came to tell him that they'd found what was left of his Grace in the bottom of a gully or stuffed unceremoniously into a storm drain like a wad of discarded newspaper. It would be hoarse and worn, the crackling, hissing pop of an old record left to spin uselessly under a ceaselessly searching needle. He would trudge into the room and watch his feet scrape over the linoleum, and after the perfunctory offer of coffee, he'd clear his throat and announce that the world had ended. Then he'd stuff his stubby, broad-knuckled hands between his knees and stare at the floor for as long as he could stand it or until another sorrow called him to duty.

He'd thought of Grissom's voice, maddeningly clinical despite the expression of sorrow his face would wear. _Take all the time you need, Greg, _he would say, shadowed from the harshness of raw grief by the murky dimness of his office. _If there are any problems with Ecklie, I'll handle it. Your job will be here when you decide to come back._

Of course Grissom would think that the job was at the forefront of his mind as he sat across from his boss with snot in his nose and the irrefutable truth of fifty years alone etched into the corners of his scalded eyes. To Grissom, the job was the only thing that was real, the only concrete reality in a world of shimmering mirages. Grissom loved without feeling, ate without tasting, and slept without dreaming. He would be sincere in his condolences, but he wouldn't understand them.

Not like Catherine, whose voice would be brittle and full of maternal anguish. She would see him as another wounded child to be protected from the viciousness of the world, and she would come to him with arms outstretched and tears trailing unkind, liquid fingers down her cheeks. Grief and pity would age her, and she would smell like lavender and old cotton when she enfolded him in an embrace. She would be the one who would bring coffee and sandwiches in the first weeks after Grace was gone, and she would be the one to wash her memory from the walls and carpet when tradition demanded it.

Sara would, well, sidle, and suck on menthol cough drops until her breath smelled and tasted like the masks he used to wear as a DNA tech, medicinal and astringent as rubbing alcohol. Her condolences would be more awkward than Grissom's, less practiced, but no matter how garbled her delivery, she would mean what she said and know why she said it. If Grissom could speak without knowing why, then Sara could feel without knowing how to say it.

Warrick wouldn't say anything. Not because he didn't care, but because he knew that there was nothing _to _say. There wasn't enough sorry in the world to close a wound that deep, and he wouldn't be stupid enough to try. He would simply linger on the edges of tear-reddened vision, appearing now and then to sigh and make small talk when the silence got too loud.

Then there was Nick, who would offer condolences because that was how he was raised, and it didn't matter how stupid or useless it was. Nick would be the one to hover fretfully at his shoulder while they lowered his Grace into the earth, and when it was time to lead him away to the idling car, Nick's eyes would be wet. Nick Stokes wore his heart on his sleeve and bled from the eyes, and he would ask after him long after the others had forgotten the reason for his sorrow.

Doc Robbins' was the only reaction he hadn't been able to gauge in the interminable hours he'd spent huddled in the break room. Though they'd both been sequestered within the sterile walls of the lab for the majority of their careers, they'd never been close. The old doctor was hip for a guy whose hairline had parted like a curtain and left his scalp as bare as a baby's bottom, but he was never going to shake his grizzled groove thing down at Whispers on a Friday night, and he was never going to convert Greg to the wonders of vegan rhubarb pie. They ran in different social circles, bound only by the job and the stink of formaldehyde on their clothes.

Maybe it was for the best, really. Intimacy was the last trait he wanted in the gloved hands that would likely eventually drop his wife's brain into a metal scale and weigh it like a gelatinous hunk of cabbage. Better that he remain an enigma, remarkable in his mind only for his forearm crutches and the authoritative clack they made as he strode purposefully down lab hallways with file folders tucked beneath his arm.

As he waited for the man on the other end of the line to speak again, he found himself idly wondering if the crutches they shared would act as a bond between them as she lay on his steel slab with her eyes closed and her lips blue and livid from cold, silencing fingers. Would he feel a kinship with her as the blade of his scalpel kissed her flesh and left its mark in the Y-incision that would lay her heart bare, or would he pluck her dead heart from her chest like an uprooted potato and plop it indelicately into his scale to be weighed?

_You asked her about that once, remember?_ Papa Olaf muttered gruffly, and now he was on the front porch of the Wisconsin farmhouse he'd shared with his Nana Olaf since they'd been expelled from Norway for making babies before taking vows. His straw hat was beside his feet, scant millimeters from the runner of the rocking chair in which he sat. He was rocking with lazy grace, and the warped floorboards creaked mournfully as he moved. He was smoking his beloved pipe, and though it had been years since he'd seen Papa Olaf, he knew how he would smell-tobacco smoke and sweet hay and the musty, meaty stink of dairy cows.

_You asked her about the mythical kinship between crippled folks. You figured that shared experiences made for an unspoken brotherhood or some other bit of naïve foolishness of that sort. You had taken her for a walk down the Strip. It was crowded with tourists, kids up way past their bedtimes and adults trying to be kids for one last, mythical night before they settled into the middle age or old age that was waiting for them back home. It was bright and loud with slot machines and casino lights and electronic fortune tellers squatting on the dirty sidewalks like futuristic panhandlers._

_She was standing in front of one of them, wavering dreamily between her three disparate centers of gravity, and idly mouthing the tropical-berry sno-cone you'd bought from a street vendor a few blocks back._

You're not gonna waste money on that, are you? _you asked dubiously, and raised an eyebrow at her._

_She turned her head and flashed you a brilliant smile dimmed only by the red dye of the sno-cone on her lips and teeth. _This thing? Please. _She snorted and shook her head. _No, that puppy is more my style. _She jerked her head in the direction of a drop-claw game a few yards away._

You are a woman of unquestionable taste, _you told her, and sauntered over to inspect the red belly of the beast._

_The game was old in comparison to its sleeker cousins along the Strip. Its façade was dented and battered from countless ill-tempered kicks, and the red paint was faded and flaking. The lights of its marquee flickered dispiritedly, and more than a few refused to shine at all. Still, it was heaped with cheap toys, and the claw had all its grasping fingers_.

_You stepped up to the controls and fed two quarters into the slot. _And what would be the lady's pleasure? _you asked with a bow and a grandiloquent sweep of your arm._

_She laughed and swayed on her crutches. _Forget it, sweetie. No point in wasting money on that stupid machine.

_You drew yourself up. _Wasting money? I'll have you know that I can wrest whatever trophy you desire from the jaws of this beast in three bucks or less.

_She raised an eyebrow at that. _You can, huh? This I gotta see.

You accept my challenge? Excellent. Merely select your prize and watch.

_She pondered the case for a moment, lips puckered in a loose, shifting moue of contemplation. Finally, she pointed her crutch at a fat, yellow chick in the middle of the inanely smiling dune. _That one.

_You inclined your head. _Say no more. Your wish is my command. Stand back and prepare to be amazed.

_Seven dollars later, you were still feeding quarters into the machine, and Grace was pressed against your back, laughing. Your indignation at being mocked was smothered by the occasional kisses she planted on your nape, cold and sharp from the sno-cone she was still licking at sporadic intervals, and by the hand that snaked around your waist and slithered up your t-shirt to stroke your stomach._

You know, I get the feeling I'm being deliberately sabotaged here, you murmured. You were trying to sound casual, but the rake of her nails over your prickling skin made smooth-talking-and a great many other things, for that matter-hard. And besides, you hardly minded.

Oh? It was a coy purr. And what, Mr. Sanders, are you going to do if it is?

_You turned abruptly and kissed her, sore fingers wrapped possessively around the sharp spars of her hips. She was so startled that she dropped her sno-cone, and it hit the pavement with a wet splatter. That was all right. It was melting anyway. She tasted like the Hawaiian Punch you drank by the gallon as a little squirt, and like ice, metallic and strangely tart._

_You didn't break the kiss until black stars blossomed behind your closed eyelids, and when you came up for air, you were both laughing and panting._

Wow, _she managed when she had gotten her feet under her again. _Remind me to play the saboteur more often.

You do, and there's more where that came from, _you growled, and nipped her earlobe._

As if I'd complain_, she replied, and swatted you on the rump_. Come on, sweetie. Let's get out of here before you put yourself in the poorhouse in pursuit of a stuffed chick worth a buck-fifty.

I can get him if you give me just one more try, _you protested, but she shook her head._

Uh uh. Besides, I'm tired of standing.

_That got you moving. If stubborn Gracie was admitting she was tired, then she was one step above dead on her feet. You cast one last, furious glance at the chick that had thwarted you; it was sitting serenely atop the pile like the king of the hill. Then you wrapped an arm around Gracie's waist to steady her, masked your intentions under the pretense of necking, and strolled towards your car._

_You passed a man in a wheelchair along the way, and he and Gracie exchanged a nod and a wave. When he was out of sight and rolling doggedly down the sloping sidewalk, you asked_, You know that guy?

No, why?

_You shrugged_. No reason. You waved, so I just thought maybe-

What, you thought it was a sacred cabal hand gesture? _She rolled her eyes and snickered. _I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but we don't get a membership card into a special club along with our diagnoses. Just bills and bills and more bile than we can possibly swallow in ten lifetimes. Nope, no solidarity amongst the limping masses. Not all of us have the coordination to raise our fists in the air. Makes impressive, strident rallies a problem, but so does busting an axle in a city pothole while marching down the street. _She shrugged and rested her head on your shoulder._

_You weren't sure what to make of that. If she was joking, you weren't sure you'd earned the right to laugh at that, and if she wasn't, then you didn't want to make an ass of yourself._

_Some of your confusion must have shown on your face because she sighed and said, _All I'm saying, babe, is that you need to lay off the Oliver Stone movies.

_And that was that. Myth busted. You went home, and she stretched out on the couch with a box of ginger snaps to watch Letterman on TV and let her exhausted legs shudder and spasm her cares away. A few nights later, you went to the store and bought her a stuffed chick and a bear as big as she was for good measure. Mr. Cheeples has since put down roots on her pillow, and Sir Honeywell is her constant companion when she's sprawled on the living floor with a good book._

"Mr. Sanders? Are you still there?"

Greg started. "Yeah, yes, I'm here," he croaked. Oh, please, God, don't hurt my Gracie.

The man chuckled. "Good. We wouldn't want you wool-gathering. That might be dangerous. You might miss something important."

_He doesn't sound like a monster, _Greg thought stupidly. _Monsters don't use words like wool-gathering. That's for the old duffers on the shuffleboard courts with their Bermudas hiked up to their nipples. Or science teachers like Mr. Kowalski who pronounced it like it was the mental equivalent of jerking off in class. Or Grissom._

_They never sound like monsters, boy. You know that. They sound like lawyers and housewives and accountants, and they talk about the Devil's work with ordinary voices. They discuss bludgeoning their husbands to death with his beloved, autographed Albert Pujols bat like they were exchanging pot roast recipes or the best way to get grass stains out of a blouse. One of your earliest cases was a sixteen-year-old boy who had raped and strangled his own mother because she took his car away. He was a freckle-faced, all-American kid with a straight-A average and a demon's forked tongue inside his mouth. The monsters catch us because they wear our faces and speak with our mouths, and no matter how many of them you see, you will never know them all._

_It's not fair, _his mind screamedand his sweaty fingers clenched spasmodically around the receiver.

_Why? Because it's Grace? _countered the gently reasonable voice of Papa Olaf.

_Yes, because it's Grace! My sweet, fiery, defiant Grace, who goes through life with her chin up and her crutches clapped to her side like sidearms. She never hurt anyone. She watches Letterman in her socked feet and eats ginger snaps and gets crumbs all over the couch, but I don't care because she laughs at my stupid jokes and tells me it was good even on off-nights. She hugs teddy bears and thinks I hung the moon, and how can she go on believing that when I couldn't even protect her from the monsters?_

His cheeks were wet, and he was dimly aware that he was weeping.

"My name is Jacob Brubaker. Does that name seem familiar to you? Think very carefully because it's very important."

A niggling memory stirred in the back of his mind, a flash of tired eyes and polished nails and auburn hair, but the name "Jacob" brought with it no face. He shifted the phone from one ear to the other, licked his lips, and said, "The last name is familiar, but-,"

"Of course you wouldn't remember specifics," Brubaker snarled contemptuously. "God knows how many lives you've fucked up, you pretentious little bastard." He laughed, a cruel, ugly caw. "Maybe this'll jog your memory."

There was a clatter as Brubaker dropped the phone, a beat of silence, and then Grace began to scream. It did not start slowly and build to a crescendo; it simply was. It was piercing and unrelenting, loud even in the distance of the connection. A keening, wailing sob wrenched from the base of the spine that went on and on and throttled his heart inside his chest.

"Stop!" he bellowed into the phone. "Stop! Stop! Jesus, stop! Stop hurting her. Gracie!"

But Gracie continued to scream, his name now, high and piercing and desperate. _Greg! Greg! Help me! Oh, God, make-make him-, _and from the corner of his eye, he saw an ashen Archie holding the headset away from his ear.

Brubaker picked up the phone again. "Do you remember now, Mr. Sanders?" he shouted over Grace's screams. "Do you? Because if you don't, I'll be happy to continue."

"No!" he pleaded. "No, I remember! I remember!"

And then he did.

_You'd been a field CSI for six months when the crumpled slip calling you to that dive crossed your palm. You'd been there yourself a time or two as a customer, back when you were new in Vegas and you were too broke to know any better. You'd lived and learned and followed the beautiful ladies to the trendier clubs on the Strip or just off. If you'd had your way, you'd never have set foot there again, but duty called._

_So you and Sara schlepped to the scene, crime kits in hand, and found the vic sprawled in a pool of blood in the parking lot, face-up and staring blindly at the stuttering neon of the sign. You found out later that she was Alice Cromartie, thirty-four, but right then, she was just another broken doll discarded beneath burned-out lights. You processed the body for trace, and Sara photographed the scene, and you traded wry jokes over her battered face._

_Her attacker had been savage. Her skull had been caved in, and a chunk of nearby concrete had shattered her occipital bone and flattened her nose. Her face had been slashed, and her left cheek hung in a meaty flap. There were finger-shaped bruises on her throat, and her blouse had been torn and her bra pushed rudely aside. There was more bruising on her breasts, as well as a fluid later identified as saliva. All the signs pointed to a lovers' quarrel gone wrong._

_So you were surprised when the preliminary DNA results came back as female. You ran them a second time just to be sure, and when the foreign secretions on her vagina came back as female, there was no doubt. Cromartie's attacker was a woman._

_So, it was off to the races, and it didn't take long to put the story together. After all, Bonnie Brubaker had never murdered anyone before, and she was sloppy. She been seen with the victim in the bar less than two hours before the murder, and her trace was everywhere-on the chunk of pavement used to smash the victim's face, underneath her nails, and inside her vagina. Fingerprints, epithelials, and DNA._

_Bonnie Brubaker sat in an interrogation room and told you with a straight, dispassionate face that she had killed the younger woman because she'd decided that women weren't her type, after all. For Alice, it had been an experimental fling to scratch an itch before she mended fences with her workaholic husband. It was one last tryst in the grotty parking lot, and so long, sister._

_But for Bonnie, it had meant a whole lot more. It had been a renaissance, a second great love affair after the slow guttering of her marriage to a limp-dick husband. She liked the feel and taste of a woman on her tongue. She was in love, and had planned on leaving her husband for her. So when she got the chaste, old-maid kiss and the bye-bye baby, it's been fun, she snapped. She hadn't given all of herself and betrayed her clueless husband just to be tossed out like trash. So she made Alice pay and shattered her looking-glass forever._

_At trial, her lawyer argued that her confession had been coerced, but it hadn't mattered. The physical evidence was overwhelming, so much so that your testimony was simply a matter of course. You turned up at the courthouse in shined leather shoes that made your feet hurt and a suit and tie that Grace had picked out the night before. It was far more subdued than the Leisure Suit Larry and Miami Vice ensembles you favored, and that was probably a blessing._

_You took the stand with flint in your mouth and your nuts in your navel, and as you testified, you couldn't shake the suspicion that your voice was cracking and breaking. You were a child playing dress-up in your father's clothes, and you were sure that the judge and the defense attorney would find you out and laugh you from the courtroom. Your bladder was a hot, constricted ball beneath your skin, and you fought the urge to fidget._

_It was an urge made worse because Grissom was observing from the back of the courtroom, head cocked as if he were studying an interesting specimen of bug. You knew he was there as a gesture of support, but you were terrified that you'd let him down. Yes, the evidence was there and irrefutable, but it was only as convincing as the lips that presented it, and you felt small and stupid and clumsy in front of a cool customer like Grissom. You knew how he would look at you if you weren't perfect, disappointed and aloof and quietly grieving your idiocy. So you gripped your knees to keep your hands from shaking and prayed that you wouldn't puke all over the witness box._

_There were other people in the courtroom, too-bailiffs and stenographers, sketch artists and reporters, court junkies. And family members, of course. From both sides of the case. Alice Cromartie's mother and husband were on one side of the courtroom, propped in the forbidding wooden pews like mannequins. If her husband had no time for his wife in life, then she had become his world in death. You couldn't look at him when the prosecutor asked you to recount what you discovered on the victim's genitals._

_Nor could you look at the Brubaker side of the room when you testified to the reasoning given for the murder. What seemed so black-and-white in the lab and the interrogation room was a lot less sterile when you had to see the effect of your words on the people left behind in the carnage. It was easier to look at Grissom's stoic face or the pleat of your dress pants._

_You were peripherally aware of the hollow-eyed, lean figure who sat behind Bonnie Brubaker's shoulder, but you didn't study him too closely. You didn't want to because than you might have to imagine what it was like in his shoes, what it was like to have your soul shattered by the knowledge that your wife didn't love you anymore. It was a fate words than death, and you averted your eyes. Maybe if you hadn't, Gracie would still be home now, and not screaming for mercy on the other and of this line._

"Do you? You've lied before. How do I know you're not lying now?" Grace reached a register he had thought impossible for the human larynx. "What was my wife's name?"

"Bonnie! Her name was Bonnie! She was tried and convicted of the murder of her lover, Ali-,"

"That whore was not her lover!" Brubaker bellowed. "That was a dirty lie, a lie you made up to send her to jail. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Yes! Just-," he struggled against a ragged sob. "-Just don't hurt her any more. She has nothing to do with this."

A wry snort. "My Bonnie had nothing to do with that whore or her murder, but that didn't stop you, did it?"

"Mr. Brubaker, if I was mistaken, there are better ways to make it right."

"Like what? Appeals? Her public defender is long gone, and as far as the law is concerned, justice has been served. I've been working on appeals since the day your lies put her away, and she's still rotting in jail. It's lonely sleeping alone in a bed meant for two, Mr. Sanders. Do you know that? No, no more wasting time on useless appeals. You ruined my life, Mr. Sanders, and now you're going to fix it. Or I'm going to ruin yours."

"How?"

"How? Oh, that's much better. Now we're getting somewhere." Mercifully, Grace's screaming stopped, though he could still hear her sobbing and moaning in the background. "It's remarkable what a little persuasion can achieve, isn't it?" Cheerful.

_Oh, Gracie. I am so sorry. So, so sorry. I'll get you back, I swear._

"Isn't it?" Brubaker repeated, and Greg sensed the implied threat of further violence.

"Yes. Yes, it is," he answered hastily. "Just-oh, God." He took a deep breath. "What do you want me to do?"

"Good. Very good. It's simple, probably far less elaborate than the lies you concocted to frame my wife. All you have to do is admit you lied and prove my wife's innocence. It shouldn't be too hard. The truth is right there in your beloved case file. All you have to do is find it."

"I-all right. How much time-?"

"Five days."

He involuntarily sucked in his breath. "Mr. Brubaker, that's not enough. I need more time. It took me months to process-,"

"That's not my problem. Five days is all you get. Give me my wife, and I'll give you yours. If not, your wife will spend eternity in a shallow, unmarked grave."

Greg sensed Brubaker was about to hang up. "Mr. Brubaker, wait. Let me talk to Grace."

"You've already talked to her."

"I know. Please. It'll help me concentrate. Consider it motivation."

There was a thoughtful silence. "Motivation?" Brubaker mused. "All right. You have one minute."

The phone was passed. "Greg?" Grace, hoarse and watery with weeping.

"Gracie. Gracie, I love you. I'm going to get you back, I promise. Are you okay? Has he broken any bones? Honey-,"

"He twisted my knee joint," she said dully, "but nothing feels broken, and he hasn't…hasn't…" She trailed off.

"Gracie?"

"I'm here. I want to go home."

"You will. I'm going to make it right, baby."

"Greg?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't give this guy his fifteen minutes."

It was the last thing he expected her to say. "I won't, Gracie."

"I love you."

"I love you, too." Strangled, and agonizing in his throat.

Then Gracie was gone, and Brubaker was on the line again. "Remember, Mr. Sanders. You have five days."

The last sound Greg heard before the line went dead was the frenetic ticking of a stopwatch.


End file.
